This would be a great time to jump up to the refrigerator and grab yourself a cold beer or maybe even mix yourself a tall cocktail before settling down to read this! After all, this is my first tilt at writing about me, the author of Hugo Comics,  Feel free to drink yourself into a mild state of euphoria while taking this all in. It’s my story about all the little incidents that meshed together to make me who I am today. I’m sure your first thoughts after reading some of my comic strips are that I play the lead role of Carl. Well maybe a little bit but I’m much more like Hugo the dog. I was always the kid with the one liner’s. It was just something that shot right out from my mouth if the opportunity to get a laugh came around. And who would have thought that at fifty five years old I would be writing comic strips, still trying to make people laugh?

It all started when I was an embryo and my mother decided to name me Coleman. This put me at odds right away while growing up. While all the other kids had names like John, Phillip, Michael, I was plagued with “what’s your first name” “Coleman”. I guess this was the first offer to come up with a funny line to offset the boredom of hearing this over and over again.

I was born in Toronto, Canada. My mother was born in Canada and her mother was born in Canada which made me very Canadian Eh!

While growing up I wanted to be a rock star with people banging down my door for autographs. I wanted to be a drummer with flying drum sticks and a rotating platform. At the ripe young age of eight I begged my dad for a drum set. Well, my family had little money to spend on such things but I was promised a snare drum with cymbal attached. Hey, you take what you can get!

While on the way to the drum shop we stopped for a quick breakfast at the local slap-up.  As luck would have it, our waitress overheard us talking about getting a drum and asked us how much we were looking to spend. She looked a little distressed when we said fifty dollars but her eyes lit up!  “I spent twelve hundred dollars last month and bought my son a full drum set”!  As it turned out her son was sent to jail for three years leaving behind this sparkling brand new set of drums. She said “give me the fifty bucks and get those drums out of my sight”!!!  I guess she needed the money!

That very same drum set started me out on the road to what I thought would be shimmering lights and stardom… NOT! I ended up playing in a band for ten years but never saw the success I craved for.

I then tried my hand at business and moved to Los Angeles in 1985 as the Managing Director of a marketing company. I spent years helping grow the business and traveled extensively. I ended up taking the business to London, England where I met the girl I would eventually marry. Her name is Anita, now my wife of 22 years.

The parent company was now looking to jump into Asia and asked me to head a team to India where there was plenty of opportunity for growth. We moved to Mumbai in 1993 where we set up the new company which we ran for eight years. Feeling a little homesick coupled with my elderly parents we decided to move back to Toronto in 2001 and settle down there leaving a managing partner in place to run the business.

In the summer of that year we bought our first house and added a little puppy to our family which we later named Hugo. It didn't’t take long for me to realise the truism behind “dog being a man’s best friend”.