William J. C. Amend III is an American cartoonist. With over 1,000 newspapers subscribing to his comic strip, "FoxTrot," Amend joins an elite group of cartoonists breaking the four-figure circulation mark.
Background
Amend was born on September 20, 1962, in Northampton, Massachusetts, 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.
Education
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.
On May 21, 1999, Amherst College awarded him an honorary degree as Doctor of Humane Letters.
Career
Despite graduating with honors, Amend decided against the graduate school 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. 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. 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. 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.
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 storyline 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." 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 the deadline.
Views
On his Website, 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."
Personality
Amend is an avid World of Warcraft player, but refuses to reveal his character's name, although he did mention in an interview with Allakhazam (a World of Warcraft fansite) that he played on the server 'Bronzebeard.'
Connections
Amend is married and has 2 children.