AMEND, Bill 1962-

PERSONAL: Surname rhymes with "Raymond"; born 1962, in Northampton, MA; married; children: one son, one daughter. Education: Amherst College, B.S. (physics; with honors), 1984.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111-7701.

CAREER: Cartoonist. Creator of "FoxTrot" comic strip, Universal Press Syndicate, 1988—.

AWARDS, HONORS: Doctorate in Humane Letters from Amherst College, 2000.

WRITINGS:

FoxTrot, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1989.

Pass the Loot, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1990.

FoxTrot: The Works (anthology), Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1990.

Black Bart Says Draw, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1991.

Eight Yards, Down and Out, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1992.

FoxTrot en Masse (anthology), Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1992.

Bury My Heart at Fun-Fun Mountain, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO,), 1993.

Say Hello to Cactus Flats, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1993.

Enormously FoxTrot (anthology), Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1994.

May the Force Be with Us, Please, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1994.

Take Us to Your Mall, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1995.

Wildly FoxTrot (anthology), Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1995.

The Return of the Lone Iguana, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1996.

At Least This Place Sells T-Shirts, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1996.

FoxTrot beyond a Doubt (anthology), Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1997.

Come Closer, Roger, There's a Mosquito on Your Nose, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1997.

Welcome to Jasorassic Park, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1998.

Camp FoxTrot (anthology), Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1998.

I'm Flying, Jack . . . I Mean Roger, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 1999.

Think iFruity, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 2000.

Assorted FoxTrot (anthology), Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 2000.

Death by Field Trip, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 2001.

Encyclopedias Brown and White, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 2001.

His Code Name Was the Fox, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 2002.

FoxTrot: Assembled with Care (anthology), Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 2002.

Your Momma Thinks Square Roots Are Vegetables, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 2003.

Who's Up for Some Bonding?, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 2003.

Am I a Mutant, or What!, Andrews & McMeel Publishing (Kansas City, MO), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: With over 1,000 newspapers subscribing to his comic strip, "FoxTrot," Bill Amend joins an elite group of cartoonists breaking the four-figure circulation mark. Amend's strip, featuring the antics of the Fox family, received a warm reception from the public since its inception in 1988. Parents Roger and Andy Fox and their children, Jason, Peter, and Paige, display real family dynamics "without resorting to the clichés of the family strip," according to Charles Solomon, writing in the Los Angeles Times. Sibling rivalries abound, but so too does a real affection between family members. Amend's daily and Sunday strips have been collected in a number of "FoxTrot" anthologies that have sold well beyond a million copies.

Amend's own family could serve as a stand-in for the Fox family. Born in 1962, in Northampton, Massachusetts, he is the oldest of four children. His early childhood was spent in New England, including three years in Newton, Massachusetts, that Amend refers to as his "Jason Fox" era. Amend draws on these childhood memories in creating his comic script, giving ten-year-old Jason some of the attributes of ten-year-old Bill Amend. At the age of twelve, Amend moved with his family to the San Francisco Bay area, where he attended high school in Burlingame, California. An avid reader of comic books and strips, he started contributing his own cartoons to his Burlingame high school newspaper, although one of his strips was cut because editors did not like its final frame: a puppy being thrown into a lion pit. In addition to drawing comics, Amend played tuba in the high school band, shot super-8 movies, served as president of the math club, and rose through the Boy Scouts to the rank of Eagle Scout. As a teen, Amend had dreams of becoming a filmmaker when he grew up.

Graduating from high school, Amend returned to Massachusetts to attend Amherst College, where he majored in physics. During his college years, he also continued drawing, writing, and publishing editorial cartoons in Amherst's school paper. He also found time to publish his own alternative student newspaper, as well as turn in a solid academic performance and win a college math award. His senior year, Amend took a basic-drawing class, but was otherwise self-trained in art and illustration. Despite graduating with honors, he decided against graduate school and in favor of pursuing a freelance career in cartooning. The real world turned out to be a bit more difficult than college, however, and rejection letters followed Amend's first submissions. He lived with his parents for a time, working as an assistant animator for a small animation company, and then for a San Francisco movie production unit. Meanwhile, he continued to send out comic-strip proposals to major newspaper syndicates.

For three years, Amend continued to gather rejections for early strip proposals such as "Bango Ridge," about a group of talking jungle animals with a bit of attitude. While "Bango Ridge" was rejected by the major syndicates, a telephone conversation with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate gave Amend enough encouragement to try one more strip. "Most of the family strips that were out there seemed to be very safe, very tame, and almost rooted in a bygone era," Amend told Andy Patrizio of the Wired News Web site. "There didn't seem to be anything at the time that I connected with as a young adult in America." So he came up with "FoxTrot" (the name is taken from a popular ballroom dance), which revolves around the Fox family, each of whose members represents a different aspect of Amend. "The math man in me is what's going on with Jason," Amend told a correspondent for the Seattle Times. "There's a frustrated athlete in me, and that comes out in Peter." In his early twenties at the time, Amend wrote his family strip from the point of view of the children: somewhat nerdish, always bickering, but funny and real at the same time. Universal Press Syndicate accepted the submission in the fall of 1987, and the first strip debuted on April 10, 1988.

From the beginning, Amend's strip found a place among the plethora of other daily and Sunday comic strips. "Bill has created believable characters," Ohio State Cartoon Research Library curator Lucy Shelton Caswell told David Astor in Editor and Publisher. "He does gags, but 'FoxTrot' is not just a gag-a-day strip. It's character driven." Amend's well-defined characters are in part responsible for the gradual growth in popularity of the strip. In addition to the family members, there are also significant minor characters, such as the pet iguana, Quincy, and Peter's blind girlfriend, Denise, the latter "a rare example of a handicapped cartoon character who isn't a smarmy role model," according to Solomon. Amend also attributes some of the early success of his strip to the "nerdification" of society, because the youngest member of the family, Jason, is something of a "brainiac" and computer whiz. As Patrizio explained it, Jason "prays for homework and hard tests and freaks out if he 'only' gets an A++ on a test." "Jason was an outlet for me," Amend further explained. "I was a recent physics major. He let me talk about modems and computers and high-tech gadgets. At the time [the strip began], this was not particularly mainstream. Now, Jason very much represents the younger computer generation. I accidentally captured that in a way readers enjoy." Amend himself became hooked on computers in high school, and has continued to grow with them, scanning his work onto his Mac and then using an illustration program to help position and shade each strip.

Amend's "FoxTrot" strip not only appeals to young readers, but adult fans have also helped to place it among the most-read daily comic strips in the United States. A young man when he began "FoxTrot," Amend was nearing forty, married, and the father of two children by the time the Fox family entered its second decade. During that time, his point of view gradually shifted from that of Jason to that of the Fox parents. "I see the parents' side of things a little more readily that I used to," the cartoonist admitted to Astor. Yet Amend still relates to his younger readership. "I'm blessed, I guess, with a sort of immature sensibility," he told the contributor for the Seattle Times. "I tell my wife, 'I have to play these video games. It's research.' Or, 'I have to go see Godzilla at the matinee show today. Research.'"

During the years since "FoxTrot" began, one thing that has remained constant has been Amend's creative process. As he explained on his Web site, he begins by writing out the story line for an entire week, and then proceeds to the artwork. He works in something of a stream-of-consciousness style for the text, as he explained to the contributor for the Seattle Times: "I create a scenario, then the characters write their own dialogue." He admitted in an interview posted at the Washington Post: Live Online that "There is a moment in just about every week where I stare at my blank piece of paper and think that the well has at last run dry and it's all over for me. . . . I think what helps me most is through luck and design, I've put together a cast of characters that lets me cover a very wide range of subjects." Although Amend does not consciously draw on the lives of his own family or of that of his brothers and sisters, personal events sometimes pop up in his zany tales. Once the story is set, he uses pencils and permanent markers to draw the cartoons, then does the inking. The writing usually takes one to two days, and Amend then spends the rest of the week drawing and inking the illustrations. Final coloring for the Sunday strip is done by a company in New York, which requires Amend to stay about two weeks ahead of deadline.

On his Web site, Amend had a word of advice for those who would like to become cartoonists: "I recommend that the aspiring cartoonist obtain the best possible education he/she can in as broad a range of subjects as possible. Too many young cartoonists forget what makes a comic strip work is much more than the ability to draw funny pictures. What sustains a strip, what makes it worth reading day after day, is the mind behind it."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Editor and Publisher, March 7, 1992, David Astor, "Cartoonists Discuss 'Calvin' Requirement," pp. 34-36; September 9, 1995, David Astor, "Should Cartoonists Draw Role Models?," p. 34; April 18, 1998, "'FoxTrot' Comic Is a Decade Old," p. 88; April 17, 1999, David Astor, "First Comic in Three Years to Reach Four-Figure Clientele," p. 52; July 3, 2000, Dave Astor, "Awards for Cartoonists Charles Schulz and Bill Amend," p. 28; August 6, 2001, p. 19.

Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1990, Charles Solomon, review of Pass the Loot, p. 10.

Macworld, June, 2001, David Ferris, "Drawn to the Mac," p. 24.

School Library Journal, March, 2003, Paul Brink, review of His Code Name Was the Fox, p. 262.

Seattle Times (Seattle, WA), July 29, 1998, "FoxTrot Cartoonist Escapes Limelight," p. E7.

ONLINE

Bill Amend Web Site,http://homepage.mac.com/billamend/ (February 1, 2003).

Mac Observer Web Site,http://www.macobserver.com/ (February 7, 2001), Eolake Stobblehouse, "Through Eolake's Eyes: Interview with Bill Amend, Author of 'FoxTrot' Comic Strip."

UComics.com Web Site,http://www.ucomics.aol.com/ (May 30, 2003), "Meet Bill Amend."

Universal Press Syndicate Web Site,http://www.amuniversal.com/ (February 1, 2003), "Bill Amend."

Washington Post: Live Online,http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveonline/style/comics.htm/ (February 14, 2003), Suzanne Tobin, "Comics: Meet the Artist."

Wired News Web Site,http://www.wired.com/ (November 1, 1999), Andy Patrizio, "Of Physics and the Funny Papers."*