A Dash of Bitters

When Cartoonist Robert Osborn left the Navy in 1946, he paid his respects to the military with a small book of cartoons entitled War Is No Damn Good! Across its pages strutted a wonderful, viciously funny parade of balloon-shaped generals and admirals, gorilla-faced noncoms and forlorn, tortured G.I.s. Last week Osborn finally paid his respects to civilian life with a book called Low & Inside (Farrar, Straus & Young; $3.75). If anything, the sequel is even deadlier and more acidly humorous than the original.

Osborn's style is faintly reminiscent of Cartoonist William Steig's bitter comments on humanity, and the title of his first postwar collection was obviously inspired by Steig's famed caption, "People Are No Damn Good." But where Steig sometimes turns soft and subtle, Osborn is freer and more frightening. With wild, axlike penstrokes, he carves out vicious children, rich dowagers, tyrants and tycoons. Heads become onions festooned with spikes; eyes are thin slits or insane whirls of ink.

Osborn draws a fat club member with the tight emptiness of a blown-up sheep bladder, a paranoiac as a jungle of harsh lines straining inside a box. And his captions have the impact of an uppercut. A black Spanish bull glowers from one page with this thought for the matador: "Now the bull is looking at you with intent to kill and all that is required of you is to go in over the horns."

Ulcers & Dilbert. Judging from his drawing, Cartoonist Osborn should have a disposition like a snapping turtle. Osborn surprises people by turning out to be a buoyant, handsome man of 48 with a pretty wife and two happy children. The son of a prosperous Wisconsin lumberman, he liked to draw pictures as a youngster, and wanted desperately to be a serious artist. The trouble was, says Osborn, that "I was quite fat, and I had to be funny all the time to cover up this fat business." The strain worried him into an ulcer at 14, but he eventually discovered how to use his humor.

After graduation from Yale, and years of failure as a painter of expressionistic still lifes and landscapes, Osborn decided to concentrate on cartoons. The war gave him his big chance. An admiral saw his broad-penned sketches and put him to work as a lieutenant doing safety pamphlets for the Bureau of Aeronautics. Osborn promptly invented "Dilbert," a pinheaded, bottle-nosed flyer who appeared in 5,000 drawings and made every harebrained mistake in the book. While instructors groaned, Dilbert dived giddily out of the blue until his wing ripped off, ground-looped, stalled, spun and smashed his protesting plane at every opportunity. By the time the war was over, Dilbert was as much a part of the Navy as battleship grey, and his creator the proud possessor of a Legion of Merit.

Snickers & Shudders. Today Osborn lives on a Connecticut farm, relaxed and happily at peace with the world until he sits down to draw. Then he spears humanity's Dilberts with the savage drawings that have appeared in such magazines as LIFE, FORTUNE, Look and Holiday. "This," he scrawls in the preface to Low & Inside, "is about the steady plight of man; the anarchy of his laughter and the terrifying lawfulness of his tragedies." Whether readers should snicker or shudder at his insane world, even Osborn doesn't know. "Humor is a funny business," says he. "It's hard to tell where humor ends and sadness begins."

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