"We're the ones at Kinko's who help the other customers change the paper and the toner because we know more about it than the employees do," cartoonist Brian Basset said about his work from home. "Just the other day, a kid came up to me and said, 'You know, we ARE hiring.'" *(1)
Working for 16 years as Editorial Cartoonist for the Seattle Times, Brian Basset was laid off in 1994 during a downsizing period. Though probably a blow at the time, it may have been a good step for Basset. Ten years earlier, he developed the comic strip Adam and received successful syndication through Universal Press. Based on an at-home father, the working mother and their family, Basset suddenly found a kinship with his creation. "I became my own character, which was a little scary."
As Basset's life changed, so did the life of his main character. (In further similarities, Basset's wife Linda had to find work to help support the real family.) Adam began to evolve into a "Home Office strip... the voice of the telecommunter and the home-based businessperson." The strip name was changed to Adam@Home to reflect the modern working environment. It now appears in over 200 newspapers plus six book collections. *(2)
Though well-grounded in contemporary life, Basset found himself yearning for the simplicity and innocence of an earlier time. He created a second cartoon titled Red and Rover, a comic strip about a young boy and his beloved dog set in the late 1960s to early 1970s. It was a long journey from inception to print, with Basset calculating that he and his wife put in over 1700 hours to develop Red and Rover. After receiving many rejections from the syndicates who wanted something targeted to a specific audience, finally The Washington Post Writers Group understood the comic strip's value and picked it up in 2000. Red and Rover, reminiscent of the style of Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes", appears in 60 newspapers world-wide and is gaining in popularity. In an interview on the Washington Post's Online Chat in June 2001, Basset said, "I felt and still feel that it's possible to do a comic strip that appeals to all generations, not unlike 'Comfort Food.'" *(3)
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