Don Martin, MAD’s Sickest Artist
by Annalee Newitz
When I was a kid in the early 1980s, I supplemented my monthly MAD subscription by convincing my parents to buy me one of the many MAD paperbacks sold near the checkout counter at Fedco. My favorites were the ones by Don Martin, the chaotic cartoonist whose “One Fine Day” strips in the magazine never failed to hold my 10-year-old attention with their frenetic motion lines and impossibly grotesque body horror.
I still have a significant number of his books from back in the day.
At the time, I thought Martin’s work was so deeply weird that I had to be the only person in the world weird enough to appreciate it. Little did I know that he was one of MAD’s most lucrative commodities. By 1981, his books had sold 7 million copies in the U.S. alone. MAD’s editors dubbed him “MAD’s maddest artist” and eventually gave him his own “Don Martin Dept.” His art was a pure expression of the magazine’s unhinged spirit. And yet, ultimately, MAD broke his heart.
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