Don Martin (May 18, 1931 – January 6, 2000) was an American cartoonist whose best-known work was published in Mad from 1956 to 1988. His popularity and prominence were such that the magazine promoted Martin as "Mad's Maddest Artist." [...]

Martin brought his portfolio to the Mad offices in 1956 and was immediately given an assignment. "The drawings that I first brought to them were kind of tight," he later recalled. "There was a very tight kind of design quality — I was using a very fine line. They encouraged me to loosen up a little bit and that’s what I did."[4]

Martin often was billed as "Mad's Maddest Artist." Whereas other features in Mad, recurring or otherwise, typically were headed with pun-filled "department" titles, Martin's work always was headed with only his name—"Don Martin Dept."—further fanfare presumably being unnecessary.

Although Martin's contributions invariably featured outrageous events and sometimes outright violations of the laws of space-time, his strips typically had unassuming generic titles such as "A Quiet Day in the Park" or "One Afternoon at the Beach." The six-panel "The Impressionist" features a bull who becomes a famous artist by smearing an outdoor painter against his canvas and displaying his remains as an abstract design.[6] The four-panel "One Night in the Miami Bus Terminal" presents a man who approaches a machine labeled "Change," inserts a dollar bill, and changes to a woman.[7] In another gag, a man is flattened by a steamroller but is saved by the intervention of two passersby, who fold him as a paper airplane and throw him to the nearest hospital.