Running Press | 1200 pages, 2 volumes | $150
By CHARLES TAYLOR | December 3, 2007
Don Martin’s work for MAD — all of it from his 32 years at the magazine collected in this two-volume slipcased edition inaugurating a series of releases of MAD artists — is instantly recognizable. His people are big-nosed schmoes with sleepy eyes, puffs of wiry hair, and what appear to be life preservers under the waistline of their clothes. Their hands make delicate little mincing gestures and their strangely thin, elongated feet take a 90-degree turn at the toes as they step forward. Whether they’re average Joes or headhunters, Martin’s people share the same physique: a tottering tower of obloids. Martin puts the bodies of these characters through every kind of permutation, treating them as much like gadgets as the squirting flowers and joy buzzers that populate his gags: glass eyes pop out from a pat on the back; heads are steamrollered into manhole-cover shapes. All of this accompanied by a Dadaist panoply of sound effects found nowhere else: shtoink! shklorp! fwoba-dap! It’s unlikely Samuel Beckett was aware of Don Martin, but had he been he might have recognized a kindred spirit. They both appreciate the jokes our bodies play on us; that fate is the squirting flower ready to shpritz us in the face. The difference is no one ever peed their pants watching Waiting for Godot.
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Topics:
Books
, Samuel Beckett, Don Martin