Comic book/strip/animation artist Mel Keefer has passed at the age of 95. Explaining to you who he was and what he did is going to be difficult because for more than sixty years, he was one of the busiest artists in the business, often called in as a replacement for other artists who had to be replaced for one reason or another. He was super-reliable and very, very good at what he did. When Roy Lichtenstein was swiping comic book panels and selling his copies as fine art, one of the artists whose work he copied was Mel.
No one is quite sure how many newspaper strips he worked on but I know of these: Perry Mason, Dragnet, Gene Autry, Mac Divot, Thorne McBride, Willis Barton M.D. and Rick O'Shay. His longest run was with Mac Divot, which ran from 1955 to 1977. A lot of comic strip fans didn't follow it because it was about golf and newspapers often ran it in the sports section. He ghosted on at least a half-dozen others but the most notable was Bash Brannigan, the strip drawn by "Stanley Ford" (Jack Lemmon) in the movie, How to Murder Your Wife. Mel did all the comic art in the film and when you thought you were seeing a close-up of Lemmon's hand drawing his character, that was Mel's hand you were seeing.
For that job, he replaced the great Alex Toth who had a tendency to quit jobs, often right in the middle. One time, Mel told an interviewer, "All the years that I have known of him, I have hardly said two words to him or he to me except once when I thanked him for affording me a nice living by accepting jobs that he walked out on. He didn't take too kindly to that."
Among many examples, Mel replaced Alex as artist of the Dell Zorro comic book and did piles of design work for Hanna-Barbera, often taking over design work on shows for which Toth was given sole credit. (Mel's first H-B job, on which he didn't replace Toth, was the original Jonny Quest.) Mel also did long stints working for Filmation on their adventure cartoon shows (from the Batman/Superman Hour in 1968 up to and including He-Man in 1985) and on the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoons produced in the sixties and on later shows produced by Marvel's animation studio.
And we haven't even discussed his illustrations for children's books (many) and all the comic books he worked on. The latter included comics for Toby Press, Charlton, Fawcett and a lot more than just Zorro for Dell/Gold Key. This obit could go on for days. He was also one of the comic book artists who appeared in the episode of Bob (Bob Newhart's short-lived sitcom about a comic book artist) in the episode about an awards show for that industry.
I knew Mel briefly and interviewed him at one Comic-Con in San Diego. Very nice man. Very serious about doing good work…and he did a lot of it. Sorry to hear he's gone but boy, did he have a great, prolific career.