He liked to recall that it was when taking orders from Stalin that his luck came closest to running out: “The phone rang. I picked it up and heard: ‘Please hold the line. Shortly, Comrade Stalin is going to speak with you’.” It was 1947, and the beginning of the Cold War.

Despite serving for decades as a loyal party propagandist on the Moscow newspaper Izvestia, Yefimov was now living in daily fear of telephone calls from the man he had come to call Vozhd (the boss).

Stalin had an empire to run, but it did not stop him intervening in the smallest of issues. The head of the Communist Party saw political caricatures as an effective form of propaganda, and would often phone up newspaper offices suggesting themes for cartoons.

The previous day he had requested a picture ridiculing the American military build-up in the Arctic. But Yefimov had not yet started it. “A few seconds later, I heard that familiar voice. He did not greet me but got straight to the point. ‘The cartoon we spoke to you about yesterday, I’d like to see it by six o’clock today.’ It was already 3.30. I thought to myself: ‘I’m dead.’ To do all that remained in two and a half hours was impossible.”

Yefimov somehow finished the artwork, just as the messenger boy was arriving to pick it up. But a couple of days later, when he was summoned in to party headquarters, there was a further surprise in store – the Soviet leader had managed to find time to rewrite the cartoon’s caption.

Read the Telegraph story to learn more about an extraordinary career.

Bill also worked on animation projects with other comic characters such as Cathy and Garfield.

Mel Casson, writer and illustrator for the Redeye comic strip passed away last week at the age of 87 of Alzheimer’s disease.

For nearly 20 years, Mel illustrated “Redeye,” a parody strip about a 19th century tribe of Native Americans, for King Features Syndicate. When cartoonist Bill Yates, who wrote the “Redeye” scripts, retired in 1999, Mel assumed full writing and drawing duties of the strip.

Mel was born in Boston on July 25, 1920. He was encouraged by his father to pursue a career in art. Seventeen-year-old Mel was the youngest cartoonist ever to sign a contract with the Saturday Evening Post. He received a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York City and while there, his artwork began to appear regularly in the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, The New York Times, Ladies Home Journal, and nearly every other major magazine.

Mel enlisted in the infantry for service in World War II and made the Normandy Landing on D-Day. His commander was killed instantly upon reaching Omaha Beach, making Casson next in line to lead the attack. Mel successfully led his men through the assault without casualties and went on to participate in all the major campaigns in Europe. For his valor, he was promoted to the rank of Captain and decorated with five battle stars: two Bronze stars, the Croix de Guerre and two Purple Hearts.

After returning home from service, Mel’s first strip was Jeff Crockett for the Herald Tribune Syndicate, which appeared between 1948 and 1952.

His career at the drawing board was interrupted once again when the Communists invaded South Korea and he was recalled to active duty. After an honorable discharge, Mel’s career at the drawing board resumed once again with the creation of the children’s panels Sparky and Angel for the Publisher/Chicago Sun Times Syndicate, which ran between 1953 and 1966. He co-created with cartoonists Alfred James and Alfred Andriola (Kerry Drake) on the strip It’s Me Dilly from 1958 to 1962.

He was a writer-producer for ABC-TV where he created the television shows “Draw Me a Laugh” and “You Be the Judge.”

He had five cartoon books published, including the anthology “Ever Since Adam and Eve” for McGraw Hill, the Whole Kids Catalogue, and the Guinness Record Keeper. His cartoons appeared in every national magazine and his drawings in advertisements for IBM, GE, Kodak and Black & Decker.

In the 1970’s, Mel worked with cartoonist William F. Brown on the trendy Mixed Singles strip, which later evolved into Boomer and appeared until 1981 with United Feature Syndicate. In 1990, Mel became the new artist of the internationally famous Redeye daily comic for King Features Syndicate, which he took over from its creator, Gordon Bess. Mel worked with Bill Yates on the panel until 1999.

He is survived by his wife, Mary Lee Culver Casson, a former opera singer and actress, daughter Culver and grandchildren Remington Paris Cheffer and Lulu Culver Cheffer.

Correction: In the original King Features’ press release, the family had indicated that instead of sending flowers that a donation be made to Alzheimer’s Association. I made the assumption that Mel had passed away due to Alzheimers, which according to Rick Stromoski, in the comment section of this story, may not be the case.

“I give all the credit to my wife Thel who was the inspiration for all the cartoons,” Keane told the Republic. “She was very, very vital to any success that I had. When the cartoon first appeared, she looked so much like Mommy that if she was in the supermarket pushing her cart around, people would come up to her and say, Aren’t you the Mommy in ‘Family Circus?’ and she would admit it.”

All cartoonists get asked about who their major influences are, and among the usual suspects it sometimes surprises people when I name Will Elder near the top of my list. The reason for the surprise is that there is almost no similarity in my work and Elder’s… at least not on the surface. His influence for me was more about his humor and his approach to it. He used all manner of tools to create multiple layers of humor in everything he did. He could “sell the gag” like no other, making the written jokes funnier with his storytelling and imparting of the essential information in a way that rang clear with readers. He crammed his panels with multiple background gags and visual humor, some related to the story and some total non-sequiturs, that required readers to reread a story several times to make sure they didn’t miss any gags. That technique, coined the “Chicken Fat School of Art” (apparently so named because in the depression era chicken fat was added to many a dish to make it more filling) became a staple for MAD. More than anything, Elder just drew FUNNY. His drawings all by themselves could make you laugh. He had a way with expression, action and energy that created drawings that were just plain funny.

Elder was not only a master cartoonist but also a fantastic illustrator, and some of his best pieces for MAD were the parodies he did of famous magazine and other print ads that were expertly executed in various styles. He could draw anything, and it showed in the composition and layouts of even his more “simple” cartoons.

“Ted Key’s wonderful cartoons have been adored by millions of readers for decades,” said Brendan Burford, King Features comics editor. “We at King Features feel fortunate to have been able to represent the work of such a legendary cartoonist.”

In 1933, Mr. Key graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and moved to New York to freelance cartoons to the many magazines then based there. He also wrote for radio, penning a play called “The Clinic” that aired on NBC and was included in a book, “Best Broadcasts of 1939-40,” which was edited by Max Wylie.

Mr. Key’s big break came in 1943, when he sold a maid cartoon to The Saturday Evening Post, a national, weekly magazine put out by The Curtis Publishing Co., the giant publishing concern that had its headquarters in Philadelphia.

The maid quickly became a feature in The Post, acquiring the name of Hazel and a family, the Baxters, which employs her to this day. Her popularity grew so rapidly that when E.P. Dutton & Co. published the first collection of Hazel cartoons in 1946, it sold 500,000 copies, a huge number for the time.

By then, Mr. Key had moved to the Philadelphia area, where he bought his current house in 1951.

Dutton eventually published eight collections of Hazel cartoons in hardback. Bantam Books put out six of them in paperback and Curtis Books issued three other Hazel collections in paperback.

In 1961, Hazel got her own eponymous prime-time TV show, which ran for four years on NBC and one year on CBS. The show starred Shirley Booth, who won two Emmy Awards for her portrayal of the maid, making her the first actor to have won Emmy, Tony and Academy awards.

Mr. Key acquired the rights to Hazel from The Post in 1969, when Curtis succumbed to the financial trouble that led to its move to Indianapolis. That year, King Features Syndicate began distributing the comic panel to newspapers. It still does, using cartoons drawn by Mr. Key before he retired in 1993.

In addition to Hazel, Mr. Key created Diz and Liz for Curtis. The brother and sister appeared in a multi-panel cartoon in the company’s monthly children’s magazine, Jack and Jill, from 1961 through 1972. They also were featured in three books, two of which were collections of their Jack and Jill cartoons.

Despite Hazel’s popularity in her heyday, Mr. Key’s best-known creations today are probably Peabody and Sherman. Mr. Key came up with them for Jay Ward, a childhood friend of his brother, Leonard Key, who needed enough material to build a half-hour show around the adventures of a flying squirrel named Rocky and a moose named Bullwinkle.

Mr. Key was diagnosed with bladder cancer in late 2006 and suffered a stroke last September. He is survived by his second wife, Bonnie; his sons, Stephen of Providence, R.I., and David and Peter of Philadelphia; and three grandchildren. His first wife, Anne, passed away in 1984.

In lieu of flowers, the family is asking that donations be made to the American Cancer Society.