Over the Comics Kingdom blog, they’ve sampled a few cartoonists for the words of encouragement that most affected their careers.
From the post:
Jim Borgman: … when every aspiring editorial cartoonist was falling under the spell of Jeff MacNelly’s work, I sent him samples of my fledgling college cartoons, which were struggling to stand on their own four legs like Bambi on an icy pond. His response — essentially, “keep going” — was all I needed to hang in there until I found solid ground. I reread that letter a thousand times until, eventually, my hands stopped trembling.