Mel (Melville) Calman was born to Jewish immigrant parents in Stamford Hill, north London in 1931. He studied book illustration at St Martin's School of Art and worked as a freelance illustrator for a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Times, Sunday Telegraph, Observer and Cosmopolitan. He became best known for his 'little man' cartoons, featuring a neurotic, large-nosed character (his alter ego), first appearing in the Sunday Times in 1962.
Cartoonist and illustrator Mel (Melville) Calman was born in Stamford Hill, north London (an area popular with the orthodox Jewish community) in 1931 to a Jewish Lithuanian mother and Jewish Russian father who had immigrated to the capital in about 1912. In 1940 his parents decided to evacuate him to Cambridge, where he was awarded a scholarship to study at the Perse School. He wanted to read English at Cambridge University, but failed to get a place, and eventually enrolled at Borough Polytechnic Art School in London in 1949. He subsequently studied book illustration at St Martin's School of Art between 1951 and 1953. In 1955 he started his two years' National Service, during which time he served as a sergeant in the Army Education Corps, and had a number of cartoons published in the army magazine Soldier. Demobilised in 1956, he became a freelance illustrator and cartoonist.
Calman obtained his first newspaper work in 1957 for the Daily Express illustrating the ‘William Hickey’ column, continuing until 1963. In 1962 Calman also published the first of more than 20 collections of cartoons, entitled Through the Telephone Directory with Mel Calman. In the same year he began a collaboration with the Sunday Telegraph, producing the ‘Bedsit’ featuring his alter ago, a neurotic, large-nosed, balding ‘little man’. Constantly facing a dilemma, this character was, like Calman, at times prone to depression. Calman’s ability to find humour in the darkest feeling made Little Man extremely popular. Calman also had a keen interest in psychology, which influenced all his work, with references to the human condition and analysis in his strip cartoons and in Dr Calman’s Psychoanalysis Book, published in 1981. In 1963 and 1964 Calman worked for the BBC's Tonight programme, and from 1964 he also contributed to the Observer, and later to the business section of the Sunday Times. Calman's work was also featured in numerous magazines, including Cosmopolitan and House & Garden. In 1970 he founded The Workshop (which later became the Cartoon Gallery) in Bloomsbury in London, one of the few galleries where one could buy the original drawings of contemporary cartoonists, among them Peter Brookes and Posy Simmonds, who held their first exhibitions there. From 1976–82 Calman contributed six cartoons a week under the title Men and Women to the Field Newspaper Syndicate, a syndication service based in Chicago. He drew single-panel cartoons for the front page of The Times from 1979–94 and in 1989 became co-founder, with Simon Heneage, of the Cartoon Art Trust (the organisation behind the Cartoon Museum in London), serving as its Chairman from 1993 until 1994. He co-authored, with Lionel Lambourne, The Art of Laughter, a catalogue of an exhibition of cartoonists' drawings staged by the trust at the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, in 1992. Calman also produced design advertisements for Shell, Guinness and other companies, and made an animated version of his ‘little man’, The Arrow for the British Film Institute (1969). In 1986 he published his autobiography, What Else Do You Do?.
Mel Calman died of a heart attack in St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, England in 1994. The following year, the British Cartoonists' Association and The Times founded the annual Mel Calman Awards for young cartoonists in his honour. Posthumous exhibitions included Mel Calman: Your'e Not Art at the Cartoon Museum (2006), and the retrospective exhibition Calman Meets Freud, curated by his daughters Claire and Stephanie Calman, held at the Freud Museum (2020). His work is represented in UK public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), British Museum, and Jewish Museum, London, and the British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, among others. A portrait photograph of Calman by Stephen Hyde (1986) is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.