Don Martin: This madness is not as easy as it looks

Don Martin's cartoon characters always looked so easy to draw, especially those incredible faces - all those heavy eyelids, bulbous noses and oil-can heads were so easy to do for yourself..

But nobody could beat Martin's flexibility, or the way he would crush, flatten, and stretch out the human body. Triple jointed bodies bent like accordions and splattered against brick walls in his crazy strips, as the clean lines of his cartoon world contained a gross and slippery momentum. Even characters walking down the street had feet that bent at impossible right-angles, as legs stretched out to ludicrous degrees.

For many Mad Magazine readers, Martin's short strips were always an absolute highlight of a new issue, and while it was always so easy to copy those faces, his figure-work was gorgeously unique. When it came to good, clean madness, Martin was in a class of his own.