Ray Billingsley, Creator of Curtis

The telephone rang at the Billingsley home in New York City. It was a call from a magazine. No, it wasn't one of those telesales agents. It was the editor of Kids Magazine, inviting the then 12-year-old Ray to draw dragon pictures to accompany the story she was writing. It just so happened that dragons were the young man's favourite things to draw. He submitted his work and immediately became a published artist. But the success didn't stop there... he was asked to be a staff artist!

The Kids Magazine editor who called Ray had been on an outing with a media group covering a junior high school recycling project in New York City, where aluminum cans were to be formed into an 18-foot outdoor Christmas tree for a hospital. Ray Billingsley was supposed to be participating, but "I thought the project was rather lame, so I slipped off to the back while all the other kids did all the work. I whipped out a pad and started to draw." The editor approached him and liked his drawings. She took his drawings and telephone number back to her office. Without realizing it, Billingsley's creative career had begun. *(1)

"While the other kids got to play after school, I had to become an artist and go to work. That's how I started, I was sort of discovered," Billingsley wrote on a May 2001 Washingtonpost.com Live Online chat.

Ray Billingsley was born in Wake Forest, North Carolina in 1957. The family later moved to Harlem in New York City. He has a big sister, Maxine, and one brother, Richard, who is eight years older than Ray. Ray was very competitive with his brother and envied the praise Richard received for his artistic talents - he could do landscapes, portraits and still-life drawings. Rather than earning admiration at age 8 for his work, Ray's fine art was laughed at. He switched to cartooning.

After graduating from the Manhattan-based High School of Music and Art, Billingsley studied on a four-year scholarship at the School of Visual Arts. Upon completion, he began an internship with Walt Disney Studios in Florida in 1979.

"Lookin' Fine" was the first comic strip developed by Billingsley, appearing in 1979 to 1982 with United Features. It seemed the world was not then ready for a strip about a black family, and it was not a success. The struggling cartoonist worked as a freelance artist "because I've done nothing else but art. I even did a line of novelty underwear, anything to pay the bills." TV commercials, animation, magazine work and posters filled his work schedule.

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