“[Curtis] is much more rounded, and that’s what I feel is very important to the maturity of any comic strip, that the characters grow along with the times, especially in my case. Now, if you have something like ‘Wizard of Id’ or ‘Broom Hilda,’ of course, they can just stay in one time, and you know, it’s just gags, so whatever they do, it goes. But strips like mine need to progress, and that’s what’s happened. I’ve kept up with the happenings of the times. Instead of Barry listening in on Curtis’ little phone calls to Michelle, things like that had to drop, because now the kids are mostly into cell phones. Oh, and you know, one of my favorite things I used to do was an imaginary record shop that Curtis and Barry would visit, and it would always change its name and its location because it featured the hardest rap that you could find, and most parents when they found out about it they would burn it down. The thing of it is, that was when rap wasn’t really accepted. Now that it’s so mainstream, it was a theme that I had to drop. So yeah, the strip grows.”

Ray Billingsley