Irreverent Mad artist Don Martin dead at 68

Known as MAD magazine's maddest artist, Don Martin, who died of cancer Thursday at a Miami hospital at 68, drew balloon-footed boobs cavorting with their heads under their arms, clowns who tap-danced into disaster and boxer-shorts-clad insects that cracked jokes.

His "sound effects" were legendary. In Mr. Martin's world, people didn't talk, buildings didn't fall, objects weren't thrown: They "blorted" and "skroinched" and "katoonged."

The humor was sick, black, slapstick: Mona Lisa, in one famous strip, was shown looking enigmatic, euphoric, then relieved as she rose from a toilet and flushed.

MAD fans couldn't get enough of Mr. Martin's warped vision, which filled the irreverent publication for 30 years until 1987, when the artist became really mad over the rights to his work and jumped to another magazine.

"There's always been physical suffering in comedy," Mr. Martin once said of the insanity that seeped from his brain to the pages of the satirical magazine founded in 1955 by William Gaines. "Even ancient clowns kicked each other in the seat of the pants or hit each other over the head. It's the same thing in our time, just a little stronger."

Mr. Martin was born in Clifton, N.J., and began his undergraduate work at the Newark Institute. He earned a fine-arts degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Mr. Martin brought his first drawings to MAD in 1957. He showed the editor cartoons of humans with square heads and double-joined feet and was "immediately snapped up," said Frank Jacobs, a longtime MAD writer who wrote "The Mad World of William M. Gaines," published in 1972. For the next three decades, Mr. Martin was MAD's most popular artist.

"He exemplified MAD more than any other contributor," said Jacobs, who serves as MAD's unofficial historian. "He was the only person who could take a lame premise and make it hysterical because of the drawing."

"Don was the only guy who could have a man just walking down the street in the first panel and you're laughing before anything happens," MAD co-editor John Ficarra said.

Mr. Martin, according to his colleagues, was the antithesis of his characters, so shy and retiring that "you could be in the room with Don for an hour and not realize it," Ficarra said.

He was attractive but unassuming, "totally uneccentric," Jacobs wrote in his book about MAD.

By 1987, Mr. Martin began to chafe under the magazine's policy of controlling the copyright to the work he did for it. A bitter legal battle ensued, with Mr. Martin demanding greater financial control of his work. The magazine insisted that it legally owned his cartoons and all proceeds, including spinoffs such as T-shirts and posters. He ended his relationship with the magazine the same year.

In 1994, he published the first edition of Don Martin, a cartoon magazine that featured a full range of his creations. The gags centered on characters with names such as Dr. Dork, The Fabulous McWebbs and a dancing spider named Ickey.

"Is it funny? That's the only test I know when it comes to cartooning," Mr. Martin said.

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.