For over thirty years, Don Martin's crazy comics filled the pages of MAD

magazine. On Sunday, January 9, 2000, Marin died in a Miami hospital at the

age of 68. A representative of Baptist Hospital says the cartoonist died of

cancer. No further details were disclosed. Martin's weirdo humor disgusted

mothers and delighted young rebels for nearly three decades. No person or

tale was free from Martin's eye for twisted satire. For example, his strips

Darris Dobbs, a well known and respected 3D/CGI writer and artist, died

peacefully at home on November 24, 1999, never having recovered from a

respiratory virus. He was 37. Darris contributed to Visual Magic Magazine

on a number of occasions, as well as writing a number of books for Charles

River Media Publishing (including ANIMATING FACIAL FEATURES AND

EXPRESSIONS, and the recently published TRUESPACE 3 & 4 CREATURE

CREATIONS). He also founded his own business -- HieroglyFX Design -- a

David Allen, one of a handful of truly great stop-motion animators, died of cancer on Monday, August 16. He
was 55. Allen's work in commercials includes animating the Swiss Miss and
early Pillsbury Doughboy in the 1960s, and his feature work includes
CAVEMAN (1981), Q-THE WINGED SERPENT (1982), WILLOW (1988) and FREAKED
(1993). For ten years he had been working on an independent project, a
feature called PRIMEVALS. (The film will be finished at Full Moon Studios
where the film was being animated before Allen's death.) Allen began his

Actor DeForest Kelley, STAR TREK's Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy died Friday,
June 10 after an extended illness. Kelley, born January 20, 1920, in
Atlanta, Georgia, US, played supporting roles in a number of movies,
including THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT (1956); GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K.
CORRAL (1957), RAINTREE COUNTY (1957), and APACHE UPRISING (1966). STAR
TREK creator and producer Gene Roddenberry had wanted Kelley to play the
doctor in STAR TREK from the get-go, having worked with him previously on

Helen Aberson Mayer, co-author with Harold Perl of "Dumbo, the Flying
Elephant," the children's book that inspired the 1941 Walt Disney animated
feature, DUMBO, died April 3, 1999 in her Manhattan home. She was 92. Born
in Syracuse, New York in 1907, Mayer, who was known as Helen Aberson when
she wrote "Dumbo," moved from Syracuse, to Los Angeles, California in 1939
at the request of the Walt Disney Company.


In her story, Dumbo the baby elephant is teased for his oversized ears, but

Elfriede Fischinger died quietly in her sleep at her home on Thursday, May
13, 1999. She was born September 17, 1910, in Gelnhausen near Frankfurt,
Germany. She attended the prestigious College of Design in Offenbach, and
in 1931 one of her abstract textile designs won a prize and was published
in a magazine as well as exhibited in Berlin, where she met her future
husband, animator and painter Oskar Fischinger. They were married in 1933
and she worked on many of his subsequent films. In 1936 they emigrated to

David McCall, creator of Schoohouse Rock, died April 18th in a car accident
near Kukes, Albania, along with his wife, Penny, and Refugees
International's European representative Yvette Pierpaoli and the car's
Albanian driver. The McCalls were en route from Tirana to Kukes, the
primary reception point for Kosovar refugees. They were on a mission for
Refugees International, the Washington, D.C.-based organization on whose
board Mr. and Mrs. McCall served. Part of the mission was to explore

Evelyn Lambart, filmmaker and close associate of Norman McLaren, died Saturday, April 3 at the age of 84.


Lambart studied commercial art at the Ontario College of Art.

Jean Vander Pyl, who was best known as the voice of Wilma Flinstone on
Hanna-Barbera's THE FLINTSTONES TV series, died Saturday, April 10 at her
home in Dana Point. She was 79.


Although born in Philadelphia, she moved to Los Angeles while still a
teenager and attended Beverly Hills High and UCLA. Her career began as a
radio performer for several radio series including AMOS AND ANDY, LUX RADIO
THEATRE, STUDIO ONE, and FATHER KNOWS BEST.


In the late 1950's, she began doing voice work for Hanna-Barbera, and

Legendary Warner Bros. layout artist, Hawley Pratt, who worked predominantly under the direction of Friz Freleng, passed away March 4 at the age of 87. He was raised in New York City and ironically graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In the 1930s, Pratt became an artist at Walt Disney Studios but soon found himself at Warners where he worked on all of Freleng's Oscar-winning cartoons including TWEETY PIE, SPEEDY GONZALEZ and BIRDS ANONYMOUS, and was nominated for an Oscar as director of the 1966 DePatie-Freleng short, THE PINK BLUEPRINT.