ANB: You state on your web site's FAQ section that you've been drawing cartoons from the age of 9. Yet you say you wanted to do movies. What happened to change your career track?

Bill:  I found the syndicated cartooning field easier to gain admission to, oddly enough. USC's film school rejected me and Spielberg and Lucas somehow misplaced the 10 zillion resumes I mailed them after college. Doing a comic strip is satisfying in similar ways to filmmaking, I imagine, and I probably have a lot more say in my work doing FoxTrot than I would likely have working in Hollywood.

ANB:  Which cartoonist have inspired you?

Bill:  As a kid, MAD magazine was my biggest cartooning influence. Much more so than comic strips or comic books. Especially Don Martin's stuff. In high school and college, Doonesbury and Bloom County's irreverence and smarts really appealed to me and probably most made me want to try to do a strip as a young adult. As I was mailing in submissions, Calvin and Hobbes debuted and was an instant inspiration for what can be done with the medium art and writing-wise. Now if only I had stronger skills, I could act on that inspiration.

ANB:  Which skills do you feel weak in?

Bill:  My art skills are pretty marginal. I think the strip works fine with the self-taught basic toolset I have, but it’d be nice to not spend quite as much time erasing my mistakes. Bill Watterson told me he could produce a week of Calvin dailies in a day. It takes me twice that long, and my drawings are a lot simpler.

ANB:  Do you think if this perceived weakness were solved that FoxTrot would do even better? I ask because FoxTrot is pretty popular as it stands now.

Bill:  Probably wouldn’t hurt, but my art concerns have less to do with the audience approval end of things as much as the ease and satisfaction of creation aspect.

ANB:  How long did it take for you to get FoxTrot syndicated?

Bill:  About three years. My plan was to try a strip, get rejected, and move on with more practical pursuits, like grad school. Unfortunately (or so I thought at the time), I kept getting "encouraging" rejection letters from the syndicates, which kept me at it without any guarantee that it would work out in the end. I give my parents a lot of credit for not throwing me out of the house during this period.

ANB:  Prior to FoxTrot, where there any other strips you attempted to get syndicated (either successful or unsuccessful)?

Bill:  I tried one strip before FoxTrot called Bango Ridge, about an animal behaviorist off in a jungle full of talking animals.  It was pretty good, I thought, but the syndicates didn't think it would work, for those inexplicable reasons syndicates have.

ANB:  Many successful cartoonist do a second (or even a third) comic strip. Ever thought of trying to bring Bango Ridge back to life now that you have clout in the industry?

Bill:  Ha ha. I have enough difficulty getting one strip out the door each week. A lot of the cartoonists whose names appears on more than one strip have assistants doing a lot of the work, so it’s more doable for them. I’m just me. I’ve been lucky in that FoxTrot allows me to explore a wide range of topics and personalities, and as a result I don’t feel like I need another strip to say things that I’m somehow not saying. I do often think about creating other stories and characters, but not in comic strip form.

ANB:  Once you became syndicated, how did your life change?

Bill:  My life pretty much became owned by my job. When Universal offered me a contract, they basically started the treadmill right then at full speed. My biggest regret is not asking them to wait a few months so I could travel and experience some things prior to the upcoming barrage of deadlines.

ANB:  How difficult is it to get time off as a cartoonist?

Bill:  It varies from syndicate to syndicate. In the good old days, cartoonists would work ahead and could take time off as often they earned it. Some, like me, found this nearly impossible to do. Every time I rushed strips, they sucked, and I’d fall back behind schedule redoing them. I had to cancel most of my honeymoon because I couldn’t get sufficiently ahead during the month before my wedding. Fortunately, Universal Press Syndicate now offers its creators four weeks vacation a year where they can substitute reruns, and a few of the cartoonists with other syndicates have negotiated similar deals.

ANB:  What's the most difficult thing to deal with now that you are syndicated.

Bill:  The isolation and pressure aren't a lot of fun.

ANB:  I assume you mean the pressures of deadlines and coming up with new strips.

Bill:  Yeah, mostly that. Being funny when you feel anything but funny, 15 minutes before a deadline, that sort of thing. And as my strip has gained a certain level of success, there’s an added pressure to do well and measure up to that success.

ANB:  Have you ever had your editor veto one of your strips?

Bill:  Oh, sure. Usually it's pretty obvious if a strip will be controversial, so I'll bounce the idea off my editor before I spend a lot of time drawing it. Sometimes I'll fight the good fight and prevail (I did one with the baseball team wearing giant-sized cups that my editor didn't want to run), sometimes I'll let him win. It depends on the joke. In the end, the syndicate defends anything that runs when newspapers call to complain, so I try to respect their need to feel comfortable with what goes out.

ANB:  Two of your treasuries have great essays you've written on the comic business (Wildly FoxTrot & Camp FoxTrot). What made you decide to do this?

Bill:  The way the books are printed in chunks of 16 (or 8) pages. There were a few blank pages to fill and I was too lazy to draw anything special. I also felt it served as a good way to educate readers about the comics industry a little bit. It's amazing how so many people read comics, and yet so few people know the slightest thing about how the business works.

ANB:  Is this why you contributed to "Your Career in Comics" by Lee Nordling?

Bill:  Yeah. That and I’d gotten to know Lee a little bit back during my submissions days when he worked at the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

ANB:  What do you think of the web as a medium for comic strips?  Ever read any web strips (ie: "Sluggy Freelance")?

Bill:  I'm generally impressed with the dedication to cartooning that web comics creators demonstrate. Obviously, the money is secondary, which is how it should be for newspaper comics, but almost always isn't.

ANB:  Many cartoonist have commented on how comic strips are getting less space. Any comments?

Bill:  The shrinking space issue was around before I started FoxTrot, so I sort of accepted that trend when I signed on. What I hadn't expected, and what drives me crazy, is the newer trend among papers to squeeze and distort comics to fit a space that may have completely different proportions than the artist intended. I've seen my strip printed almost as a square. It's infuriating, but the syndicates are so timid anymore with client papers, that there aren't easy ways to end the practice. And a lot of papers' editors don't even know their pagination people are doing this.

ANB:  Did this issue have any bearing on your changing the size of your regular FoxTrot books?

Bill:  The change in book formats came about as a bunch of things converged. First, I’d changed my Sunday format to one that didn’t have predictable panel breaks, which made fitting them into the old square-shaped books awkward (see a small Zits or Get Fuzzy book, for example). Also my publisher wanted a book schedule that had a new book every six months with treasuries released in the Fall season, which would mean an even number of books per cycle. Finally, I’d always felt that my treasuries and small books were not different enough. So, we made the smaller books a little smaller, cheaper and more snack-like, and in a shape that better accommodates the horizontal Sundays, and the treasuries will be more meal-like, with more strips than past treasuries.

ANB:  Are the new-sized books selling well?

Bill:  It’s all relative. There are Far Side/Calvin sales numbers, then there are the rest of us. Among the rest of us, I’m doing fine.

Editor's Note:  You can boost FoxTrot books to Far Side/Calvin & Hobbes numbers by buying those books here!

ANB:  I've got to know, are the math/physics problems that show up in the strip real (meaning they can actually be solved)?

Bill:  I was a physics major in college, so the occasional math stuff in the strip is my way of trying to justify the $$$ spent on my college education. I try to get the math/physics/computer stuff right, but I make mistakes about 20-percent of the time. The curse of being a B student.

ANB:  One of the things I love about FoxTrot is Jason and his love for things computer, science fiction, and fantasy. Would it be safe to say that you are a fan of the same things as Jason?

Bill:  Jason is an amplification of my geeky side. I was much more of a sci-fi and fantasy fan as a teenager than I am now. I remember getting to the opening screening of Disney's "The Black Hole" four hours early to beat the line, and being the only ones there until about five minutes before the show. Nowadays, I'd just get there 15 minutes early.

ANB:  "The Black Hole" is still one of my favorite movies. So what was your favorite genre movie of this past year? Favorite genre show?

Bill:  “Fellowship of the Ring,” no question. I’d waited my whole life to see live-action Tolkien on the big screen, and it really was a thrill. And we get two more installments!

I don’t watch a lot of TV these days. It’s that damn Internet’s fault. “The X-Files” was probably the last sci-fi show I watched with regularity. A lot of people tell me I should see “Farscape,” so I might rent the DVDs and play catch-up one of these days.

ANB:  Andy is an interesting character. On one hand she's a vegetarian and is constantly cooking vegetarian meals. On the other she's cooking a big, fat turkey at the holidays and buys meat dairy products for herself and the kids. Additionally she is a career working woman but also a housewife. How did she come about as a character?

Bill:  She's not a vegetarian, she's just big on feeding her kids healthy meals. It's an exaggeration of the way parents are always making kids eat their spinach and other vegetables. I established her writing career early in the strip as a way for her to be home all the time and yet have an outside life, but found the work aspects of FoxTrot less interesting for me to write about than the home, school and social ones, so I don't do much with it.

ANB:  I'm guessing you are a MAC guy but you are also familiar with the PC. If so, which do you like best and why?

Bill:  I find the Mac experience to be less intrusive and generally better. My experience with a PC was one of seemingly endless driver updates and weird error messages. But some of my best friends are Windows users. 8^)

Thanks Bill.

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