Bill Amend is the creator of the comic strip FoxTrot.
Early Life[]
Amend lived in Massachusetts during his "Jason Fox years" and lived in the San Francisco Bay Area during his Paige and Peter years. Bill started drawing cartoons for fun when he was in fourth grade, but didn’t really think about doing it professionally until after college. He attended high school in Burlingame, California where he was a cartoonist on his school newspaper. Amend is an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. He earned a BA in physics from Amherst College in 1984.
Career[]
After a short time in the animation business, Amend decided to pursue a cartooning career and signed on with Universal Press Syndicate. FoxTrot first appeared on April 10, 1988. On May 21, 1999, Amherst College awarded him an honorary degree as Doctor of Humane Letters.[2]
On December 5, 2006, Universal Press Syndicate issued a press release stating that his strip, FoxTrot, would turn into a Sunday-only strip. Amend stated that he wants to continue doing the strip, but at a less hurried pace.[3] This news was followed by several weeks of the characters discussing a "cartoonist" semi-retiring to Sundays only, and what methods he would use to phase out the daily strips. The last daily FoxTrot cartoon was printed on December 30, 2006. Amend also sometimes does guest strips for webcomics such as Scott Kurtz's PvP, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins's Penny Arcade, and Randall Munroe's XKCD. [4]