In my brief, but enriching cartooning career, I got to view some great cartoons and meet many talented people. Of these, I got to know one or two very well, through sharing the road of discovery of the craft. One such person, is someone I have great admiration and respect for: Paul Curtis, creator and artist of a comic strip I hope to have permission to share and talk more about, one day.
     I met Paul during my two years at Sheridan College's Cartooning and Graphic Story Arts course, in Oakville, Ontario, amid a class that also produced Marvel Comics artist Peter Grau, children's book illustrator/writer, Bill Slavin, the one-time Toronto Sun editorial cartooning team of Michael McDonnell & Tim Cerantola, cartoonist/animator Keith Milne, as well as television performer/writer Gary Pearson.
     During the course of our classes, Paul did a strip in the style of Walt Kelly featuring a great character, that everyone in the class loved. Paul's goal was to create a comic strip of this character and syndicate it in newspapers. I had similar aspirations for my own fledgling comic strip, the basis of which I had created in my pre-teen years. With this in common, we hit it off very well.
     When I left Sheridan in 1979 my first full-time job was working under another fellow Cartooning classmate, Paul McCormack, as a screen-printer for a t-shirt transfer print company in Strathroy, Ontario. When that business grew enough that another printer was needed. We learned that Paul Curtis was seeking work in his hometown of Dundas, so we contacted him and he joined the crew in the fall of '79. It was a pleasure to get to know both Pauls during this time of hard, hot and humid work. Following work hours at the t-shirt factory,  Paul was hard at work drawing his strips, while I pinned my hopes on mine. When I moved back to my hometown of Markdale to get married, Paul and I continued to correspond and trade stories of our cartooning exploits, as we moved toward our goal of newspaper syndication.
     We used to trade stories of the rejection letters we'd get. It was always frustrating to get one, but when we discovered we got the same ones, the blows didn't seem so harsh. One day, Paul got a letter from a syndicate that seemed like there was interest in his strip. Paul telephoned me, excitedly describing what had happened. I was jealous for an instant, but that later gave way to hopefulness. "If Paul makes it, maybe there's still hope for me", I thought.
     The letter from Chicago Tribune Syndicate made much of the fact that Paul's style reminded them of Walt Kelly, but later correspondence criticized his storyline and subject matter. Unknown to either of us at the time, Paul had jumped several hurdles of the business to a wonderful opportunity. Paul asked me what he should do, so I naturally said "whatever they ask you to do...this is your chance!" So, Paul created another 2 weeks of strips and re-submitted. We both kept our fingers crossed. I had seen the strips Paul had done and we agreed, they just didn't reflect the "joy" of his original strips, but they were still excellent. A month later, Paul received the strips in the mail, with an attached rejection letter. It was rejected and we were both DE-jected. Only a bit of confidence IN-jected through the experience.
     Paul later got a university campus newspaper to carry the strip and ended up doing editorial cartoons in the periodical. He ended up being paid to do editorial cartoons in a local community newspaper for many years afterward. He never gave up on the original character, though his chance at national syndication was long behind him. Regardless, it was a wonderful experience and led him to meet a beautiful woman, get married, have two wonderful sons and enjoy a fulfilling career, where he got to use his creative skills over and over again.
     Thanks to this quirky industry called "cartooning", I got to meet Paul Curtis, be inspired by his talent and enjoy his friendship, even until this very day. Its not the success story you'd expect to read here, but such things are infinitely more valuable than material wealth. May all in this industry end up so wealthy.