1906-1996
Cartoonist
Brown Robert, American cartoonist born in Pennsylvania in 1906. Robert (“Bo”) Brown attended the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1928. He planned on a career as an attorney and was a law school student when the Saturday Evening Post accepted one of his drawings; he renounced forthwith the perquisites of the “Philadelphia lawyer” to become a gag cartoonist, a vocation he has been pursuing successfully ever since. Working in ink. lines and washes. Brown calls cartooning a “relaxing” profession and claims to do his best work when he is tired.
Brown’s style is adequate to his purpose but hardly distinctive, being a derivative melange of the early 20th-century styles upon which he was raised. His gag lines are generally acceptable, but much of his humor is topical and without noticeable bite or recurrent imagery, and so does not stand up as well as the humor of the greatest of his contemporaries-artists like Peter Arno or George Price. When he avoids the topical and exploits the cliche, Brown is at his best.
For example, in a late-1940s panel a prospective customer points angrily to his children, sitting rapt before the console radio, and exclaims to the television salesman who has dropped by to make a pitch, “You mean I’ll even have to look at Oatsy-Woatsies?” In this case, Brown proved rather prophetic, for it was precisely “Oatsy-Woatsy”-supported television programming that ultimately killed off the mass- circulation general-interest weeklies like the Post and Look that provided the main market for his bland, middle-of-the-road art and humor.
Reference: The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 1981
