Born in 1931 and lasting in this crazy, mixed-up world until the year 2000, Don Martin was a mixy, crazed-up cartoonist for Mad Magazine who would come to be billed as “Mad Magazine’s Maddest Artist.” His greatest work was done during his Mad years, from 1956 (the year I was born… not a coincidence, I firmly believe) until his retirement in 1988. And I learned a lot from him by reading his trippy toons in Mad from my childhood until my early teacher-hood.
His style is uniquely recognizable and easily identifiable. Nobody cartoons a Foon-man like Don Martin.
The googly eyes are always popped in surprise. The tongue is often out and twirling. Knees and elbows always have amazingly knobbly knobs. Feet have an extra hinge in them that God never thought of when he had Adam on the drawing board.
And then there is the way that Martin uses sound effects. Yes, cartoons in print don’t make literal sounds, but the incredible series of squeedonks and doinks that Martin uses create a cacophony of craziness in the mind’s ear.
And there is a certain musicality in the rhyming of the character names he uses. Fester Bestertester was a common foil for slapstick mayhem, and Fonebone would later stand revealed by his full name, Freenbeen I. Fonebone.
And, of course, one of his most amazingly adventurous ne’er-do-well slapstick characters was the immeasurable Captain Klutz!
Here, there, and everywhere… on the outside he wears his underwear… it’s the incredible, insteadable, and completely not edible… Captain Klutz!
If you cannot tell it from this tribute, I deeply love the comic genius who was Don Martin, Mad Magazine’s Maddest Artist. Like me he was obsessed with nudists and drawing anatomy. Like me he was not above making up words with ridiculous-sounding syllables. And like me he was also a purple-furred gorilla in a human suit… wait! No, he wasn’t, but he did invent Gorilla-Suit Day, where people in gorilla suits might randomly attack you as you go about your daily life, or gorillas in people suits, or… keep your eye on the banana in the following cartoon.
So, even though I told you about Bruce Timm and Wally Wood and other toon artists long before I got around to telling you about Don Martin, that doesn’t mean I love them more. Don Martin is wacky after my own heart, and the reason I spent so much time immersed in Mad Magazine back in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.
=========== Soon I will get grumpy and forgetful and strange
And then I am going to die.
But my life, though it’s practically over, has been valuable.
And not just to me…
Or maybe you need to see 7 reasons why?
I was good at the things I chose to do in life. More students, principals, and school administrators thought so than saw me as a terrible teacher. For 31 years. Plus three years of substitute teaching.
I was never a vampire, zombie, ghost, or… if I was a werewolf in the 1990s. I am cured now.
I never had a broken leg, never drove a car off a cliff, never sank a ship, and never was mauled by a zoo animal that escaped its cage with hunting me on its mind.
No butterfly in China ever flapped its wings and caused a tornado that did anything more than damage the roof of a house I was in.
I knock on wood daily.
As a teacher, I lost a couple of critical battles… suicide and gun deaths, one case of AIDS, and one muscular dystrophy. And I cried at every single one of those final defeats. And yet, they all knew I was trying to help. And there’s a large number who live and love me still for what I was able to give them. The scales are heavy but balanced.
And I am 69 now. 26 years of diabetes. 51 years of arthritis. 70 will probably be the last 7 I can manage if I can manage any more than now. But I woke up alive this morning, and every new day is a precious gift. Painful or not.
And you are probably saying to me in your head right now, “Mickey, this is not a poem. It has no rhyme or rhythm”. It isn’t anything more than a paragraph with a list attached.
“Ah!” I say. “But I am claiming my whole life was a poem. One big, giant, evil poem Lived with more than a little special sauce on the meat of the sandwich. And can you truly say,
This life was not the shortest, clearest, best way to say something so profound it shook the bones of the Universe?”
Susu, my imaginary granddaughter loved it. (She’s imaginary because she was only a possibility for a few weeks and never got born.) And she’d give you a big hug if only she could.
The Ixcanixian Cultural Ambassador from the Squeelix Sector of the Planet Ixcanix sent me an e-mail about his planet’s newest idea for a cultural exchange. He calls it the “Ixcanixian Spleegle Gorn Vorpaloop” which translates to the “Ixcanixian Interstellar Bad Poetry Challenge”. At least, it does if I am conjugating the verb “Vorpaloop” correctly. It is difficult because you have to drop the silent “y” before adding the “aloop” without causing it to explode. I know it is probably a very bad idea to present it here on this planet, but he talked me into it by promising to promote my novel Catch a Falling Star on his homeworld and at least two other planets in the Bugeye Federation.
Here are the rules for the alien poetry contest;
Entries can only come from planets in the Orion Spur of the Sagittarius Spiral Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. (So, for you non-astronomers out there, we on Earth do qualify.)
All poets must be less intelligent than the Mud-Eaters of Paralaxos IV as they will be employed as judges of what poetry is truly bad. (Again, Earth qualifies as we have recently re-elected Trump and also allow Nigel Farage of Great Britain to continue to exist.)
Entries must not be so long that the total weight of letters exceed critical mass and form black holes in the intergalactic servers when uploaded.
Vogons need not apply. Their poetry is so bad that they would automatically win, causing the death of trillions of bad poetry readers in the galaxy.
Entries must not cause thermonuclear reactions with cesium.
Please refrain from confusing good poetry with bad poetry. The Vornloos of Talos XII are looking for poetry they can weaponize, and no one wants a poetry contest winner to suddenly create World Peace on Talos XII. That would be bad for the galaxy as a whole in ways that are very difficult to explain.
A sample of interstellar bad poetry is included here to inspire the kind of poetry we seek.
Ratzen Bargle’s Bisketoon (a love poem by Touperary Kloob, Poet Laureate of Antares VI)
Ratzen Bargle was a Doofus,
From the planet Rufus-Ploofiss,
And he had a lovely bride,
With a head not tall, but twice as wide.
She had three eyes, and two were green.
She had the loveliest fleen you’ve ever seen.
And as they sat ‘neath a wayward moon,
He kissed his lovely bisketoon.
Immediately before naught was said,
She bit off his tiny three-eyed head.
And then she ate him bones and all
With sauce that really becomes the fall.
And so it is on Rufus-Ploofiss,
That males all die with one last roof-kiss.
Because they sit under wayward moons
With their lovely, hungry bisketoons.
Should you have the unfortunate urge to participate in this senseless and probably suicidal poetry contest, you are welcome to offer four-line poems in the comment section, or email longer poems to Mickey at mbeyer51@gmail.com. I will attempt to transmit the worst offers to the Ixcanixians as soon as I get my interstellar flooglebeeder transmitting again. I will also post winners in a future alien poetry blog.
I have been warned that prizes range from instant execution by the Lizard Lords of Galtorr Prime to a beat up copy of Mickey’s 2012 novel Catch a Falling Star. So, good luck with the bad poetry.
I must confess, I did not submit any of my terrible poetry as I don’t want any of the prizes.
Being a writer is a life of music that happens only in your head. You hear voices constantly. They pulse rhythmically with insights and ideas that have to be written down and remembered. Otherwise the music turns clashing-cymbals dark and depressing. Monday I wrote a deeply personal thank you to the Methodist minister who saved my life when I was a boy. I posted a YouTube music video by the acapella group Pentatonix with that essay in a vain attempt to give you an idea of the music in my head when I composed that very difficult piece to give myself a measure of peace.
I realize that I am not writing poetry here. Poetry can so easily slip into melody and music because of rhythm and meter and rhyme. And yet, words to me are always about singing, about performing, about doing tricks with metaphor and meaning, rhythm, convoluted sentence structure, and other sneaky things that snake-oil salesman do to get you to think what you are hearing is precisely what you needed to hear. The Sonata of Silence… did you notice the alliteration of the silvery letter “S” in that title? The beat of the syllables? Da-daah-da a da-da? The way a mere suggestion of music can bring symphonic sounds to your ear of imagination as you read? The way a simple metaphor, writing is music, can be wrapped into an essay like a single refrain in a symphonic piece?
A sonata is a musical exercise in three or four movements that is basically instrumental in nature. You may have noticed that the movements are loosely defined here by the accompanying pictures, of which there are three. And it is silent only in the way that the instruments I am using themselves make no noise in the physical world. The only sounds as I type these words are the hum of an old air conditioner and the whirr of my electric fan. Yet my mind is filled with crescendos of violins and cellos, bold brass, and soft woodwinds. The voice saying these words aloud only in my head is me. Not the me you hear when I talk or the me I can hear on recordings of my own voice, but rather the me that I always hear from the inside. And the voice is not so much “saying” as “singing”.
Writing makes music. The writer can hear it. The reader can too. And whether I croon it to make you cry, or trill it to make you laugh, I am playing the instrument. And so, the final notes of the sonata are these. Be happy. Be well. And listen for the music.
I think I posted this picture once before and told you it was inspired by William Blake’s poem The Tyger! That is still true. I wasn’t telling a lie, at least, I don’t believe I was. So the poem goes like this;
The idea is that the Tyger represents some unknowable evil that we must fear and respect because it is beyond our understanding. But the kid in the picture seems to be unafraid. Was that a mistake? Or was I really thinking this?
Apologies to Bill Watterson for stealing his cartoon for this post. I needed a more dangerous-looking Tyger than the one I had.
I have had a practically life-long fascination with trains. Where did that come from? It came from a Methodist minister who once upon a time saved my life.
Reverend Louis Aiken (in the cowboy hat) was a lover of HO model trains, as well as country music… and, of course, God.
My best friend growing up was a PK, a preacher’s kid. And as we hung out and played games and got into imaginatively horrible trouble, we invariably wound up in the basement of the parsonage where his father kept his HO train layout. I learned lessons of life in that basement in more than one way. I have to explain all of that somewhere down line. But for now, I have to limit the topic to what I learned about trains. They are a link to our past. They are everywhere. And they do far more for us than merely make us cuss while sitting and endlessly waiting at the railroad crossing.
When visiting Dows, we absolutely had to stop and take pictures at the train station.
This is, by my best guess, an SD40 locomotive parked at the restored train station in Dows, Iowa.
Spotting trains to take pictures of, gawk at, and totally make cow-eyes over has become a way of life to me. When visiting Iowa, especially Mason City, Iowa, we always have to stop at the engine on display in East Park.
When I was a kid, this old iron horse was not fenced in to protect it from kids, weather, and other destructive forces. Now, however, it is fully restored and given its own roof. This is a 2-8-2 steam engine with two little wheels in front, eight big wheels in the middle, and two little wheels at the back (not counting wheels on the coal tender). I have ridden on trains pulled by such a behemoth. I love to watch the monkey gears grind on the sides of the wheels forcing steam power into the surge down the tracks. And I can’t help being a total train nut. Of course I don’t deny being more than one kind of nut. But being a mixed nut is another post for another day.
There is considerable evidence that I am not a totally normal human being, or as Danny Murphy used to say “A normal human bean”. Danny is, by the way, a character in several of my novels, including Snow Babies and When the Captain Came Calling. He did the complete Circle Streak (running around the entire high school campus buck naked in a huge and chilly circle) more than once. And he was based entirely on one of my high school classmates and friends. That bird-walk about streaking is an example of the kind of quirks I am guilty of when I am being totally not-normal. I am now entirely off topic and must pull it back to defend myself by saying, “Nobody else is a totally normal human bean either!”
Among my many quirks and oddities is my love of baseball and slavish dedication to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball club. My favorite World Series memories are from 1934, 22 years before I was born. Dizzy Dean was a 30-game winner pitching for the Cardinals. Joe “Ducky” Medwick was their star hitter, and in the 6th inning he hit a triple and slid hard into the third baseman with his cleats up (a trick learned from former Detroit Tiger Ty Cobb) and the Tiger fans lost their cool in a big way (they were behind 9-0 at the time in the deciding 7th game). They began throwing things at Joe as he tried to play left field. He nearly missed an easy fly ball because somebody threw an orange and almost hit his glove. It is the only time in baseball history that a baseball commissioner had to eject a player from a World Series game for his own protection. (Needless to say, I love to hate the Tigers.)
I also love all the other ten times the Cardinals have won the Series, and I am proud of the eight times they nearly won besides.
Another of my odd quirks is a love of nudity in spite of my skin condition that prevents me from comfortably being a nudist. I first encountered nudism in a clothing-optional apartment complex where my girlfriend’s sister lived in Austin. I went from being shocked almost to apoplexy, to my girlfriend’s overwhelming amusement, to rejecting a chance to try nudism in the late 80’s, to actually spending a day at a Texas nudist park in 2017, and really enjoying the experience. My children are mortified.
And this quirk affects my fiction. I have some characters in a few of my stories based specifically on nudists I have known. I also wrote an entire novel, A Field Guide to Fauns, about a boy learning to live with his father and step-mother in a residential nudist park. Additionally, I have irrationally tried to use the word “penis” in every novel I have written. I only failed to do so when some editors insisted on its removal. So, I believe I may be 12 for 16 on that score. (14 of 24 as of this posting in 2025)
But this particular quirk, no matter how totally embarrassing my children find it, is not a sexual perversion. I don’t write porn. And, as a survival matter after being sexually assaulted as a child, my nudity fixation has helped me to accept that I am not evil and unworthy when I am naked. My attacker had me convinced otherwise for more than twenty years.
I am also an aficionado of science fiction, classical music, and a faith that tells me rabbits make better people than people do.
My books are divided, for the most part, into Cantos instead of Chapters. This is because of my love for Classical Music and my dedication to the weird notion that novels should be more like epic poetry. Not necessarily written in verse, though if I ever get to write Music in the Forest, that one is written as poetry.
But paragraphs need to be written as purely poetically as perfect white pearls that are poetically pearly.
But as poetry, my tendency towards comedy rather than drama or tragedy, leads me to write purple paisley prose (like all this p-word nonsense) which makes my paragraphs more Scherzo than Nocturne, Sonata, or Symphony.
While researching alien invasions for the novel Catch a Falling Star, the story of when aliens from deep space tried to invade Iowa, I came across internet information that ignited another quirky passion of mine, studying conspiracy theories. And it isn’t all just a plot to embarrass my children in front of people we know in real life. Although that is a definite side benefit. But conspiracies are an excellent source material for making humor. Comedy gold. Knowing who people like Alex Jones, David Icke, and Jesse Ventura are, gives me not only easily ridiculed personalities to make fun of, but also windows into thinking habits that may or may not turn up some real anomalies in the world of science and so-called historical fact. For instance, I can credibly argue that there is more to the Roswell Crash story than the government is willing to tell us about, and Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK by himself, if at all.
And besides, my boyhood friend Robert was part of my small-town gang when we fought off the alien invasion in the 60’s, and he told me on Facebook that he remembered when that happened. Good old Bobby. He really likes beer and alcohol.
And I could go on like this for an entire book’s worth of silly jabber. But this post has to end for today. This blog, after all, isn’t the only quirky and crazy thing I have to attend to.
So, I am trying to use what I am learning from AI art programs to help me do a better job of promoting my writing adventures with the loopy, unrealistic goal of making money with books. I know… stupid Mickey thinks authors ought to make some money off the books they’ve published too. What a stupid guy that Mickey is. He doesn’t know that money made from books on Amazon goes 99% to Jeff Bezos. He’s the one risking death in space inside his super penis rocket. That means he deserves the larger share of any money my writing may have earned on his super, super-sized everything delivery service. All hail the penis-flying bald man who invented sending books everywhere by drones!
So, let me go ahead with the promotional picture I created for the nudist short-story collection, Adventures Without Clothes. My story, “The Kelpie” is in this book which sends all proceeds to Doctors Without Borders. Good book. Good story by me. Great nudist fiction by Ted Bun, Will Forest, Paul Z Walker, and other contributors from the naturist/nudist fiction creators from the internet. It is doing better profitwise than any other book that I am associated with, including my very best books..
You can see I posed naked in the mountains with the book to lend a sense of adventure to the promotion. I actually posed naked for this picture, since I am supposedly a nudist myself. My wife and daughter refused to have anything to do with the taking of this photograph. I had to learn how to make my computer tablet take the picture according to voice commands. And the mountains didn’t want to be in the picture either (Which caused me no grief since I didn’t want to freeze my personal dillybonger off.) I cheated by inserting the mountains with Picsart AI photo editor. Dillybonger saved, mountain and family not embarrassed to death.
So, naturally, you now want to click on the link above to get your personal copy of this wonderful book based on my fabulous naked promo picture.
So, let’s try that same thing again with another recent book, my book of Evil Poetry bound in paperback form under a black cover with a large skull on it. That’s the way to sell a book of poetry, right? By calling it evil and failing to scare you with another picture of my horrid naked self. The brown shirt is not photoshopped on. I was really wearing clothes this time. The waterfall is again an invention of Picsart AI.
Of course, good poetry is capable of many things. It can make you laugh. It can make you cry. It can make you hurt. And it can make you die (at least a little. Besides, cry and die rhyme a little.)
And nowhere am I claiming this is good poetry. It is probably, definitely not GOOD POETRY. I condemn it wholly as EVIL POETRY in the very title. You should try it anyway. I was good in the picture, wearing my clothes and everything. And if you like poetry there are some things you may like in this book. And if you hate poetry, you will definitely find things here to bolster that point of view. And it is illustrated with some good to mediocre artwork.
So, now you know what happens when a dumb guy is allowed to play with AI and digital tools. And also allowed to promote his own books with his own naked pictures and terrible jokes.
Catch a Falling Star 