Melville Calman was born on 19 May 1931 at Stamford Hill, London. He was the youngest of the three children of Clement Calman, a Russian-Jewish timber merchant, and his Lithuanian wife Anna. As a child, Mel was sent to Cambridge to avoid the Blitz during the Second World War and was educated there at the Perse School. Unable to obtain a scholarship, he failed to gain entry to Cambridge University, returned to London and in 1949  enrolled at the Borough Polytechnic Art School, later studying book illustration at St Martin’s School of Art and at Goldsmiths’ College. After two years of National Service with the Army Education Corps, his first commissioned work was a book jacket in 1955, and in the following year, he became a freelance cartoonist. He submitted samples of his work to Punch, but the art editor returned them with the cutting observation that ‘neither drawings or cartoons measure up to the standard required here’. However, in 1958, he succeeded in placing work with the ‘William Hickey’ column in the Daily Express. Although in regular work, he left that newspaper after five years, seeing no prospect in competing with such legendary figures as Osbert Lancaster and Carl Giles. In 1962 he began producing his trademark ‘little man’ character for the Sunday Telegraph, and in 1979 he took it with him to the Sunday Times. He worked in the office, and, according to one observer, ‘stalked morosely under his cap into News International towards the end of the day in time to watch the six o’clock news, consulted as briefly as possible the back bench of editors about his daily idea, and went down to the art department.’ There he drew his cartoons in pencil, leaving someone else to draw the ink border around them. Calman’s angst-ridden ‘little man’, strongly reflected his own life-long depressions. In 1963 Calman claimed that he was ‘surly before breakfast, depressed after lunch and suicidal at night, and lives in discreet gloom in Bloomsbury.’ He also listed his recreations for Who’s Who as ‘brooding and worrying’, but this humour concealed real depression. He spent ten years in analysis, describing himself as ‘stable… except when I’m being unstable.’ Topics focused on the little man’s anxieties about health, death, God, some dilemma, a couple failing to communicate, achievement, morality and women, a style of humour that his Times obituary described as ‘of the black, self-deprecating Jewish variety, in the style of his New York heroes, James Thurber, S J Perelman and Woody Allen’. A small-format single-frame ‘pocket cartoon’, the little man series used hand-lettered text with minimalist detail, a technique he had evolved due to early weaknesses in draughtsmanship. The cartoons were always drawn in pencil, using 4B or 5B for the main illustration and 4B for the lettering. He tended to draw at twice reproduction size on Croxley Script paper. He claimed his ‘little man’ was ‘not autobiographical. At least not totally.’ Calman published some 20 books of his cartoons, also worked in advertising for Shell, Guinness and others, and contributed illustrations to many books and periodicals. He was resident cartoonist on the BBC TV’s ‘Tonight’ programme (1963-64). From 1964 he also contributed to the Observer newspaper. Calman’s work appeared in numerous magazines, including Cosmopolitan and House & Garden. He also wrote three plays for BBC Radio. In 1970 Calman founded The Workshop – which became The Cartoon Gallery – in Bloomsbury in London, as a showcase for the work of many of his colleagues. In later life, he became an art dealer and collector. In 1989 with Simon Heneage, Calman co-founded the Cartoon Art Trust. He was married twice: to the magazine designer Pat McNeill, and to the artist Karen Elizabeth Usborne. Deborah Moggach was his partner for the last ten years of his life. He died of a coronary thrombosis at the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, London on 10 February 1994 and was buried alongside his mother and sister at the Jewish cemetery, Waltham Abbey, Essex. In 1995 the British Cartoonists’ Association and The Times newspaper founded the annual Mel Calman Awards for young cartoonists in his honour. Always encouraging to new artists, it was through his advice that Posy Simmonds got her first cartoon published, on the women’s page of The Times. As she recalled, ‘In 1968, when I was leaving art school, he left a note on my diploma show, offering help in finding work’: ‘It was through his advice that I had my first drawings published.’