A Message from the Author - Bill Amend '84
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The Best of Foxtrot is an annotated two-volume collection of what I consider to be my better or more interesting strips from FoxTrot's first 20 years.
For those not familiar with FoxTrot, it's a newspaper comic strip that I started shortly after graduating from Amherst. I was lucky enough to land a deal with Universal Press Syndicate -- the same people who distributed Doonesbury, The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes -- and, despite my not really knowing what I was doing, somehow manage to make a career out of it.
The strip centers around the chaotic Fox family, with emphasis given to the three kids, Peter, Paige and the young ubergeek Jason. The humor tends to be youthful and topical and there's a strong current of nerdiness, which shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone who knew me in college.
It's interesting both for me and (I hope) readers to see 20 years of material distilled into one pair of books where the evolutions of my writing and drawing styles and choices become more obvious. I've sprinkled annotations in the margins here and there to give at least some insight into my thought process. My hope is this collection will serve well as both a nice trip down memory lane for long-time readers and as a convenient way to play "catch up" for those new to the strip.