Bill Amend
Bill Amend was born in 1962
in Northampton, Mass. Doctors on the scene do not
recall anything particularly noteworthy about his arrival
into this world, which is too bad. It would have been
fun to tell you that the Earth shook or the heavens
exploded with lightning and fury. No such luck. Bill's
mother does recall a high degree of pain during
delivery, but we are told this is pretty normal and we
shouldn't consider that symbolic of Bill's personality in
any way.
Bill's early childhood was spent in and around New England, with an
especially memorable three years in Newton, Mass.These were his "Jason Fox"
years, and he thinks back to
them often in the course of writing his strip.
At age 12, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where Bill attended
junior high and high school. It was during this time that he began to contribute
cartoons to various school publications, not always to great fanfare. His
high-school paper wouldn't run one cartoon of his, for example, which featured as
its punchline a puppy being thrown into a pit of hungry lions. The school
counselor took a special interest in young Bill from this point onward. In addition
to cartooning, Bill played tuba in the school band, made weird little super-8
movies and, for a brief time, was president of the school math club until he was
impeached. He was also an Eagle Scout and was active in his church, especially
after the aforementioned brushes with explosive death.
Bill attended Amherst College, where he majored in physics. This is, as you might
imagine, not the traditional course of study pursued by cartoonists, but it has
allowed Bill to write those occasional math-oriented strips that maybe three
people in the universe think are funny. In fact, he has a side-splittingly clever
Schrodinger-equation joke lined up for this year's Mother's Day. While at
Amherst, Bill drew editorial cartoons for the twice-weekly paper, co-published
his own newspaper his junior and senior years, drank a lot of beer and began to
think about pursuing a career in cartooning. Whether the beer played any role in
these thoughts is unclear. So, when senior year came and all of his classmates
were stressed out preparing resumes and grad school applications, Bill spent his
days merrily doodling away.
Despite his plans to the contrary, however, the merriment didn't last long. Bill's
early comic strip attempts were cruelly greeted by rejection letters from
syndicates, and he spent the first couple years after college living with his parents
and with no clear job prospects. It was very pathetic. He worked briefly as an
assistant animator for a small company until he made the mistake of erasing and
re-drawing a lead animator's work. Then he worked for a time at a movie
production facility in San Francisco until he met a visiting Leonard Nimoy and
figured the job could only go downhill from there. He continued to send comic
strip submissions to the syndicates every now and then and eventually, after about
four incarnations, FoxTrot caught the attention of the editors at Universal Press
Syndicate. FoxTrot debuted on April 10, 1988.
Bill is now married and has a young daughter and son, and a middle-aged
German shepherd.