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... Many PLAYBOY readers knew Granny, the unabashedly sexual saggy-breasted cartoon character who relentlessly attempts to seduce men, but far fewer are familiar with the artist who invented her for PLAYBOY’s pages: Robert “Buck” Brown.
Like Granny herself, Brown was, in his own telling, an unlikely candidate for the aspirational world of PLAYBOY. Born in 1936 outside Morrison, Tennessee, Brown moved to Chicago as a toddler with his mother and brother, part of the Great Migration of African American families out of the South. His mother worked during the day and, lacking childcare options, sent Brown to accompany his older brothers to school. He was three or four years old when, amazed, he watched a teacher draw a truck on the blackboard.
“To me, he was making a truck,” Brown recalled in a 2007 HistoryMakers interview with Larry Crowe. “I wanted to do that too.” After finishing high school and supporting himself with odd jobs, Brown joined the Air Force at the age of 19. Serving for nearly four years, he drew satirical sketches of his unit in his free time; the positive reception helped him “learn the power of the pen.” When he received his discharge papers, he returned to Illinois and found work as a bus driver for the Chicago Transit Authority in the late 1950s.
It was along his route that he found the initial inspiration for his Granny character. “A bus is, you’ll pardon the pun, the perfect vehicle for a cartoonist,” Brown said in a 1981 Playboy collection devoted to his work. “I used to keep a sketchbook and cartoon the situations that would happen on the bus. That’s how I learned the art of storytelling.” Slice-of-life moments included several in which older women boarded his bus asking innuendo-laden questions such as “Do you go down?” or “Do you go all the way?
Hoping to get a foothold in the cartooning world, in 1961 Brown sent his first batch of sketches to PLAYBOY, expecting rejection; he had already been turned down by The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. “I wanted to be a cartoonist, but I knew deep down inside I couldn’t, so I figured, if I was going to get my stuff rejected, why not get rejected by the best?”
The Granny cartoons are Brown’s most popular, but perhaps more incisive are his works that comment on politics and race. Michelle Urry, PLAYBOY’s longtime cartoon editor (and Brown’s commissioning editor), described his takes on the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s as “gentle but sophisticated.” Take, for example, his October 1967 cartoon that addresses the segregated housing then common across the country.
In it, a group of black adults face a line of white ones on a suburban street; rather than protesting the new arrivals to the neighborhood, the white people smile and hold signs of welcome. Expressions of confusion appear on the black neighbors’ faces. The caption reads, “It must be a trap!”
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