Above: a prescient gag cartoon by Ray Billingsley for Ebony Magazine. Ray Billingsley has a new site, Ray Billingsley Art, which has all kinds of great cartoon art in it. Not only is there information on his long running CURTIS newspaper comic strip, but his bio -- titled Life on a Deadline -- detailing his work and how he got to where he is today -- is fascinating reading.
Rat became successful as a teenager by working hard, cartooning all of the time.
"Art jobs began to take up a lot of my time. In fact, most of it. It wasn’t uncommon for me to work on several projects at the same time, all highly different and commanding different styles. My mother says I used to draw “in the air”. Trying to have just a normal life, and do what my buddies did was becoming impossible. No one around was into art, as I was, and interested only in things that led to jail, or worse. Playing basketball, fathering children they had no intention on rising, and getting high was the rule. They thought I was weird because I was creative. I thought they were weird because they weren’t. Drawing had become second nature to me and was as easy as breathing. It was all I did. All I knew."
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