Debra Pickett

"They're all based on real people," Brown says of his many characters. In 30 years of drawing Arthur, Brown has developed a whole neighborhood full of friends, classmates, teachers and parents so true to life, despite their existence as cartoon animals, that kids often ask for their phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

In fact, in one of the early Arthur books, Brown included a reference to his own home phone number, where he still occasionally gets calls asking, "Is Arthur home?"

"My wife," Brown reports, "came up with the best answer for that one. She says, 'He's at the library.'"

Too much licensing?

Brown, who trained as a painter and once aspired to make beautiful illustrations for other people's books, never quite expected to be the center of a big commercial enterprise. In fact, he declined several offers to turn the Arthur books into a television show before striking a deal, which he guessed would last about two years, with PBS 11 years ago.

"I came to TV," he says, "like Fred Rogers -- who was a good friend -- from the position of really hating TV. So much of what was available for kids -- they didn't tell good stories. . . . It's really important for kids to get fully developed characters, and they just don't get a lot of that."

Unfortunately, despite a few exceptions like "Blue's Clues" and "Dora the Explorer," says Brown, the landscape hasn't really improved since then.

"My big problem with the current state of children's television is that there's more time spent on the licensing than on the content," he explains. "Ever since Barney . . . you know, Barney had 400 licenses [for different products] and that, to me, was a little scary. At the height of things with Arthur, I've had 40. And, in my heart, I knew that was too much."

Brown is down to about 15 licensed products now, he says, and those are mostly things like vitamins, bandage strips and organic pasta, that are "good for kids."

Because his current project -- the one non-Arthur-related endeavor he's got time for this year, a book called The Gulps Go Green -- deals with childhood obesity and issues of nutrition, Brown requested that we meet at a "healthy, vegetarian spot" for our lunch interview. So we're sharing a small table in the Roscoe Village cafe Victory's Banner, known for its vegetarian cuisine, and drinking organic tea while eating raspberry pancakes.

"You don't want to use humans for something like that," Brown says of the Gulps book. "It's too close, too touchy a subject for people. So that's where animals come in."

Brown has never shied away from dealing with touchy subjects, so his characters deal with many of the challenges that face today's kids, from asthma to peanut allergies. His work has never been controversial, though -- or it was never controversial -- until an episode of "Postcards from Buster," an Arthur spinoff, included two children with same-sex couples for parents.

To Brown's great surprise, then-newly appointed Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling issued a strong condemnation of the show, leading PBS to cancel a planned broadcast (though some local stations opted to show it anyway).

'I'm such a control freak'

"I was terribly disappointed that the secretary of education would single out people in this way," Brown says now. "I don't understand why you would want to exclude a group of children. I was so disappointed in her wanting to exclude the kids and disappointed that PBS backed down a little bit, too."

When I suggest that all the publicity might have actually been good for the show, Brown looks confused. He seems not to have a cynical bone in his body. And, so, when a sari-clad waitress with a cool, European accent -- the restaurant is owned by a student of meditation guru Sri Chimoy and many employees are also Chimoy followers -- swoops by our table and removes Brown's plate before he's had the chance to take more than a couple bites of his pancakes, he just smiles politely and notes that he doesn't like to have a heavy meal in the middle of the day anyway.

Brown, who lives in Massachusetts, is dressed in a navy blue blazer that's adorned with a silk pocket square. And, though he looks every bit the New England patrician, he has a mischievous sense of humor that occasionally sneaks out from beneath his polite and dapper shell.

He grins broadly, for example, when he describes the time he pulled the plug on an Arthur movie because the quality of animation wasn't up to his standards.

"I'm such a control freak," he says with a laugh, and looks, for a moment, like he might be deeply enjoying the memory of tormenting a bunch of Hollywood executives.

There's a new movie project in the works, he says, this one a computer-generated animation video due out in August.

"This could be Arthur's leap to the big screen," he says.

The timing is good -- Arthur, already seen in 110 countries and territories around the world, is making his debut in Japan, a huge market for animated features -- but Brown's enthusiasm is measured.

"We'll see how it goes," he says.

Franchise will end with him

Ever the protective father, Brown already has decreed that Arthur will never grow up -- "he will always be exactly 8 years old" -- and that the Arthur franchise will not pass from his hands to another author. He seems, too, to have a certain ambivalence about the idea of his young alter ego becoming a movie star.

"I once thought I'd lost my childhood, but it came back to me when my kids were born," Brown says, with all the reverence of a guy who understands what a fine thing it is to be able to hold onto childhood for as long as you possibly can.