Bill Amend

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2007)

Bill Amend IPA: /ˈbɪl ˈeɪmənd/ (born September 20, 1962 in Northampton, Massachusetts) is an American cartoonist, best known for his comic strip FoxTrot.

Born as William J. C. Amend III, Amend 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.^[1] He attended Amherst College, where he drew comics for the college paper. He majored in physics and graduated in 1984. In 1982 Amend took first place among sophomores in a mathematics prize examination at Amherst.^{[citation needed]}

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.

Amend currently lives in the midwestern United States with his wife and two children, a boy and girl.

On May 21, 1999, Amherst College awarded him an honorary degree as Doctor of Humane Letters.

Amend made a television appearance on The Screen Savers, which aired October 20, 2003 on the former TechTV. Amend is also an avid World of Warcraft player, but refuses to reveal his character's name, although he did mention in an interview with Allakhazam.com (a World of Warcraft fan site) that he played on the server 'Bronzebeard' (Jason is often shown or referred to playing "World of Warquest" in the strip).

On December 5, 2006, Universal Press Syndicate issued a press release stating that Amend's 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.^[2] 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.

On May 26, 2007, Amend was presented with the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.