[1] In 1953, he worked briefly as a window trimmer and frame maker before providing paste ups and mechanicals for various offset printing clients and beginning his career as freelance cartoonist and illustrator.

But Martin also did several longer pieces, including parodies of poems by writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Guest and Clement Clarke Moore, thematic collections of gags on a single subject such as Moses, superheroes or Dracula, as well as full parodies of the Gentle Ben TV series and the films Excalibur and Conan the Barbarian.

[6] 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.

[8] 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.

Martin's immediately recognizable drawing style (which featured bulbous noses and the iconic hinged foot) was loose, rounded, and filled with broad slapstick.

It was typified by a sameness in the appearance of the characters (the punchline to a strip often was emphasized by a deadpan take with eyes half open and the mouth absent or in a tight, small circle of steadfast perplexity) and by an endless capacity for newly coined, onomatopoetic sound effects, such as "BREEDEET BREEDEET" for a croaking frog, "PLORTCH" for a knight being stabbed by a sword, or "FAGROON klubble klubble" for a collapsing building.

[9] (Martin's dedication to onomatopoeia was such that he owned a vanity license plate which read "SHTOINK," patterned after the style of his famed sound effects.)

Charles Taylor described Martin's unique art style: 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.

[13] Concurrent with his Mad output, Martin and an assortment of writers produced a series of paperback books, to which he retained the copyrights and eventual publishing rights.

For this reason, the content of these books was not included in 2007's Completely Mad Don Martin box set.

Gaines insisted that Martin's original page rate was for both publication in Mad and all future reprints in any format.

[16] In 1991, Martin complained about Mad's chummy and tribal atmosphere to the Los Angeles Times, saying, "It's looked upon by the people there as a good thing, like one big family.

"[17] From 1989 to 1993, Don Martin created a daily comic strip called The Nutheads, featuring a family that worked at "Glump's Market," a cluttered store.

[citation needed] Martin was a member of both the National Cartoonists Society[20] and The Graphic Artists Guild (GAG).

[21] In 1972, after sitting for an interview with The Miami Herald, the newspaper wanted to take a photograph of Martin and his family to accompany the piece.

However, he then drew impromptu life-sized character masks, which Martin, his wife Rosemary, and son Max obligingly wore over their faces for the published portrait.

In 1986, the animated feature Don Martin Does It Again was created in Germany by director Andy Knight, and produced by Gerhard Hahn's Deutsche Zeichentrick Erste Produktions GmbH & Co. KG.

307, "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" (2001), of Matt Groening's science-fiction animated television series Futurama, lead character Hermes Conrad mentions a planet called "Don Martin 3" that went "kerflooey", an homage to one of Martin's sound effects.

In 2007, a two-volume hardcover box set of Martin's complete Mad magazine work was published by Running Press.