[1] Semi-autobiographical in nature as a reflection of artist Brian Basset's childhood, Red & Rover is a retro-feel comic strip about the unconditional love between a boy and his dog that captures the spirit and flavor of the early-1960s to mid-1970s.
In 2013, Red and Rover received the Reuben Award for Best Newspaper Comic Strip by the National Cartoonists Society.
In 2009, after nearly 25 years of drawing Adam@home, Basset decided to focus squarely on Red and Rover and he handed over the illustration duties of the older strip to Big Top artist Rob Harrell.
Red and Rover is usually set around the end of the 1960s or the beginning of the 1970s, although a strip from November 20, 2009, depicted a car which bears a striking resemblance to a mid-1970s Ford Country Squire station wagon,[2] and in a Sunday strip from August 28, 2011 Red plays a parody of Jaws, a film from 1975.
[3] Red (real name Russell McLean[4]) is a 10-year-old boy who dreams of going into space one day as a NASA astronaut.
He enjoys model rocketry, baseball, reading comic books, and other pastimes associated with boys his age.
This trope is used most famously in Charles M. Schulz 's Peanuts, where the bird Woodstock and sometimes even Charlie Brown can similarly read Snoopy's thoughts.
His carefree childhood days are marked by the usual woes of school, as well as exploring nature, napping in the shade of a large tree during summer vacation, chasing Popsicle Pete's ice cream truck, playing "fetch" with Rover, delivering newspapers, and imagining space exploration in a cardboard box rocket with co-astronaut Rover.
On March 16, 2010, Rover revealed that his grandfather, "Merganser McIntire," was a Chesapeake Bay Retriever and his grandmother, "Codfish Kate," was part Portuguese Water Dog.
Martin's bedroom is off-limits to Red, who occasionally sneaks in to read his brother's comic books.