Brian Basset
Brian was born on November 30, 1957, into an artistic family. His father, Gene Basset, spent more than 40 years behind the drawing board, first as a sports and theatrical cartoonist in the 1950s, and then as an award-winning political cartoonist for Scripps Howard Newspapers, and later for the Atlanta Journal until his retirement in 1993. Brian's brother Roger is an accomplished painter and a graduate of England's famed Royal Academy of Art. Darien, his older sister and the one with the Harvard MBA, can't draw her way out of a paper bag.
Similar to an army brat, Brian was a newspaper brat. He first drew his teacher without clothes as a kindergartner in Hawaii...his principal with two heads when he was in the first grade in Ohio...and the school cafeteria attendant dishing out platefuls of Martian brain stew oozing over the tray when he was just a freckled second-grader in Maryland. Brian further honed his humor skills by watching TV's "My Three Sons," "The Monkees," and of course "The Brady Bunch" while he was growing up in the Washington D.C. suburb of McLean, Va. In Brian's world you were either a fan of "The Brady Bunch" or "The Partridge Family," but never both.
Following high school, where he was given his first chance to draw for a student publication, Brian enrolled at Ohio State University, majoring in fine arts. It was on the student newspaper, The Lantern, home to such past giants as James Thurber and Milton Caniff, that Brian would really sharpen his pencils as he took up residence as the editorial cartoonist, drawing three cartoons a week for three years. Brian knew he'd made the right choice in schools, when, on his first week drawing for The Lantern, legendary Buckeye coach Woody Hayes would claim amnesia when flattening an ABC cameraman, even though 15 million viewers on national television remembered otherwise.
During the summers of 1977 and '78, Brian served internships on the Detroit Free-Press as an editorial cartoonist. It was after this second go-round in the Motor City that Brian, feeling sufficiently cocky, forwent his last year at Ohio State and set out to see the country and to cut his cartooning teeth as a full-time professional.
In the autumn of 1978, among the misty firs and pre-grunge culture of Seattle, where just a single Starbucks dotted the landscape, Brian somehow managed a six-month tryout drawing political cartoons for The Seattle Times. That tryout turned into a 16-year stint. His position at the Times was eliminated for "budgetary" reasons in 1994. Fortunately for Brian and his family of one wife, two boys, and numerous piles of bills, he had begun drawing a comic strip back in 1984 called ADAM. ADAM centered around a stay-at-home dad and his bread-winning wife. Although it was never intended as his primary source of income, Brian had become his own cartoon creation, almost overnight. The comparisons didn't end there. Brian's situation now called for his wife, Linda, to go back to work. Linda began to take on an eerie similarity to Adam's wife, Laura ... right down to the mole on her left thigh.
With this all-too-real life experience finding its way into Brian's sketchbook of ideas, ADAM began displaying a far sharper edge. What was once a play on the Mr. Mom theme had transformed itself into the Home Office strip ... the voice of the telecommuter and the home-based businessperson. Even Laura (ADAM’s wife) made news as she fell victim to the corporate hatchet on Christmas Eve, only to re-emerge a few months later as an employee in a large bookstore, quite possibly the only full-time retail employee in the comics today. Brian's "downsizing" has become ADAM's "upsizing" in popularity. ADAM is syndicated in more than 200 newspapers. As the home-based work force continues to mushroom, so does ADAM’s client list. ADAM has spawned six book collections, including the bestseller, BLESS THIS HOME OFFICE ... With Tax Credits.
Brian is also a lifetime .455 hitter in slow-pitch softball, which isn't saying much considering the ball comes toward the plate at two miles an hour.
