Brian was born on November 30, 1957, into an artistic family. His father, Gene Basset, would spend 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. However, an older sister, Darien, the one with the Harvard MBA, can't draw her way out of a paper bag. 

Not unlike an army brat, Brian, a newspaper brat, 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. It was here growing up in the Washington, D.C., suburb of McLean, Va., that Brian would hone even further his early skills at humor by watching TV's "My Three Sons," "The Monkees," and of course "The Brady Bunch." 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 saw 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, set out from Detroit and his last year of college to see the country and 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 one lone Starbucks dotted the landscape, Brian somehow managed a six-month tryout drawing political cartoons for The Seattle Times that eventually turned into a 16-year stint until his position 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, which centered around a stay-at-home dad and his bread-winning wife. Brian had become his own cartoon creation, never intended as his primary source of income, overnight. The comparisons didn't end there. The situation now called for Brian's wife, Linda, to go back to work, where she 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 ... a voice for the telecommuter or small home-based businessperson. Even Laura in the strip made news as she discovered the corporate ax 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. Syndicated today in more than 200 newspapers and climbing as the home-based work force continues to mushroom, ADAM has spawned five book collections, with the latest "BLESS THIS HOME OFFICE ... with tax credits" due out in October 1997. 

Brian is also a lifetime .455 hitter in slowpitch softball, which I guess isn't saying much considering the ball comes toward the plate at two miles an hour.