Don Martin : Strikes Back : Once MAD’s maddest artist, the cartoonist who influenced a generation of dark humorists is up to his old tricks in a new magazine. But will his work seem relevant in today’s smash-and grab video culture?

Don Martin presents the sights and sounds of the big city:

Fagrooon. Fooma-doom. Splooga-poom.

Whattaya, weird? Those are buildings col lapsing in the distance.

Poit! Thwap!

An eyeball pops out and hits the floor.

Spwapo!

One kid’s fist meets another’s nose.

“Look, I just try to imagine what these things sound like, and then I draw them,” Martin says. “If they’re funny, that’s all that matters to me. I’ve been thinking up these visual gags for years.”

It’s lunchtime in a noisy Manhattan bistro, and the slack-jawed waiters waddling by Martin’s table fit right into the cartoons he made famous in MAD magazine. You can almost imagine him dreaming up comic characters as cups and saucers clatter around him and the mid-day pig-out begins:

Glink! A steak knife bounces off the metal plate in a customer’s head.

Dikka-dakka. Dikka-dakka: The credit-card computer spits out a bill.

Shaglomp! A man chews and spews cole slaw.

“Hey, I could use all this stuff,” says Martin, marveling at the bedlam. “I get creative material everywhere . Always have.”

For more than 35 years, Don Martin has been an avatar of sick humor in a culture that cries out for swift kicks in the pants. Long before Beavis and Butt-head, he drew unsettling and warped cartoons that amused some (mostly adolescents) and alarmed others (mostly parents). A quiet and reclusive man, he’s created an irreverent world where Franz Kafka and Looney Tunes collide, leaving good taste--and civility--in the lurch.

In the strip “One Fine Day in Florence,” for example, Martin draws the Mona Lisa with expressions ranging from enigma to euphoria and relief. In the last panel, she rises from a toilet, flashes an unambiguous smile and flushes.

Twisted? Martin grins. Proud of his demented humor, he modestly acknowledges its offshoots in the work of Gary Larson (“The Far Side”), Matt Groening (“The Simpsons”) and others.

“All these people were influenced by Don Martin because he was one of the first to do truly black humor,” says Sergio Aragones, a cartoonist with MAD magazine for 30 years and a co-founder of the Cartoon Artists Professional Society in Southern California. “I always used to look for his contributions first in MAD, since he took such a different approach. It was wacky and very grotesque.”

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To his fans, Martin’s characters are instantly recognizable: Fat-footed boobs prancing down the street with heads under their arms; clowns tap-dancing into catastrophe; wisecracking insects in boxer shorts.

There’s a darkness in his work, some of it autobiographical. Since the early 1950s, Martin has struggled with cornea problems that have greatly impaired his vision. He often uses a magnifying glass to finish off fine details in cartoon drawings, but this hasn’t greatly affected his creative output. He continues to churn out wickedly inventive work.

“There’s always been physical suffering in comedy,” Martin says, as a waiter almost spills soup in a grandmother’s lap at the next table. “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.”

Last month, the 62-year-old cartoonist published the first edition of Don Martin, a cartoon magazine featuring a full range of his cartoons and characters. It’s a big step forward for a man who feuded bitterly with MAD over the copyright to work he did from 1957-1987. Although Martin demanded greater financial control of his work, MAD insisted that it legally owned his cartoons and all proceeds, including such spinoff products as T-shirts and posters.

The dispute tempered somewhat in 1992 with the death of William Gaines, the magazine’s founder, who had clashed bitterly with his upstart cartoonist. By then, Martin had moved on to Cracked magazine, where he negotiated a better professional deal. Meanwhile, he retained the copyright to some 11 cartoon books written earlier and became more financially secure.

Not bad for a cartoonist once known as MAD’s Maddest Artist. But now he faces troubling new questions: Are his slapstick comic books relevant in today’s smash-and-grab video culture? Will teen-agers buy them?

“I don’t know,” Martin says with a shrug. “I wonder myself. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear somebody ask that. . . . Things change.”

The artist looks perplexed, then his wife charges in. Norma Berger has been fidgeting while her husband muses about creativity, and she’s ready to burst. How dare people ask such questions? Don’t they know this man is a genius?

“People do get older,” Martin continues. “Young people come up in the culture and other people are replaced. It just happens.”

“Mozart is never replaced!” Berger interrupts, shocking the table into silence.

Martin looks puzzled, but his wife swells with pride. She straightens in her seat and savors every syllable: “I said, Mozart is never replaced!”

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They didn’t call him Wolfgang in Patterson, N.J., where Martin was born. But he showed early talent for drawing and, like many aspiring comedians, young Don had a mouth. Teachers were always telling him to be quiet.

Martin, however, was too busy laughing at the world around him. Like the teen-agers who crack up over MAD’s parodies and spoofs, he was constantly making fun of adult pomposity and he adored slapstick humor.

“I used to get thrown out of class a lot for cutting up,” he says. “And I’ve continued to laugh at the same things I used to laugh at when I was a kid. You know, bumps on the head. The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy.”

Growing up in the ‘40s, Martin was influenced by the cartoons of Vergil Partch, who worked for Look magazine, and by the drawings of Norman Rockwell. He attended the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and began looking for work as an artist.

His early cartoons went through several stages; at one point, Martin painted brooding pictures that suggested Expressionism more than satire. Yet all that changed when he approached MAD in 1957 with free-lance submissions. Martin liked the publication’s zany humor and hoped to become a contributor.

Editors rejected his initial work, however, saying it was too tightly wound. They urged him to loosen up and try something different, and he responded with weird-looking cartoon characters--precursors of his later style. His second submission was part of a satire in which Alfred E. Neuman, MAD’s patron saint, answered spiritual questions like those fielded by Norman Vincent Peale in his national newspaper columns.

Gaines bought the drawings and Martin found a long-term home. Until he parted company with the magazine in 1987, he was one of “the Usual Gang of Idiots” gracing the masthead. He enjoyed nationwide celebrity, but after 25 years he also chafed under his financial situation.

Like other cartoonists, Martin worked on a strictly free-lance basis for the magazine. Editors treated his contributions as “work for hire,” meaning MAD owned the material in perpetuity. Martin thought he was being shafted, but he was a private man and rarely mentioned the issue to friends and colleagues.

Enter Berger, his wife since 1980, who finally insisted that Martin terminate his relationship with the magazine. The two had heated arguments, but Martin eventually listened to her. Since then, she has played an increasingly active role in his career.

As Berger sees it, her husband had to take control of his creative life. Bill Gaines, she says, “was certainly a very charismatic man. But he was driven by creative furies, and his fury was to control and own.”

Officials at MAD view it differently. Martin was treated no differently than anyone else, they say, and there were no secrets about the magazine’s financial rights. If artists didn’t like the terms, they could leave.

“When Don left the magazine, he sent Bill Gaines a letter saying he was unhappy and that he was jumping ship,” Co-Editor John Ficarra says. “That was Don’s right. Whether it was a good move or not for him is something he and his accountant would have to decide. . . . He had always been willing to go along with this (work for hire), and when he left, he left.”

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Since the breakup in 1987, Martin has published six books and made a name for himself in Europe. His work has been well-received in Germany, and he was commissioned to do animated campaign spots for Sweden’s Social Democratic Party. His cartoon compilations have been translated into six languages.

It’s a career to be proud of, but the question nags: Is Don Martin over the hill? The gags in his new comic book offer some answers.

“Presenting Doctor Dork” is vintage material, with two screwballs cavorting in a laboratory and blowing themselves to bits. “The Fabulous McWebbs” tells of a conniving vaudeville performer and his faithful cousin, Ickey, a dancing spider. Other jokes rekindle the spirit that Martin pioneered in MAD, featuring Poit! Thwap! and other standbys.

Today’s kids, however, thrill to animated cartoons where teen-age lowlifes set fire to cats and tell barf jokes. There’s an increasingly hard, mean edge to such humor that makes Martin’s jokes look tame, even sedate.

He’s heard it all before.

“When underground cartoons first came out in the 1960s, people who knew my work started doing those cartoons,” Martin recalls. “And they said, ‘Why don’t you come along? Why are you staying behind? This is where it’s at.’ ”

Martin refused to bite, and the underground craze eventually flamed out.

It’s impossible to predict what’s genuinely funny or lasting, he says, and there’s no telling how long “Beavis and Butt-head,” “The Simpsons,” and any other mass media cartoons will remain popular. Or humorous.

“Is it funny? That’s the only test I know when it comes to cartooning,” Martin says. “Not whether it’s sick, or whether it’s going to ruin people’s values or morals. You only have to ask a simple question: Is it funny?”