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Last updated 6-20-07
Reader Thorin Burkhard-Horn sent along this fun Quicktime movie he made last year. Who needs Hollywood?
My pal Stephan Pastis had some fun with the subject of my semi-retirement recently. In case your paper doesn't carry his strip (write and complain!), or in case you missed them, I've posted them here.
Added note: Liane Hansen and Will Shortz discussed the strip on NPR's 2-25 Weekend Edition broadcast. I feel so famous! (Even if they DO mispronounce my last name... it's AAY-mend! AAY-mend! AAY-mend!)
UPDATE
My syndicate failed to update the correct version for the various web sites before they all skeedaddled for the holiday weekend, so as far as I know, it's wrong everywhere. Here's the corrected version. Sorry about that.
The perfect holiday gift! OK, so it's not AS perfect a gift as a PS3 or a Wii, but it IS available in stores.
For those of you interested in seeing the correctly colored in picture, there's one posted here.
Because not everyone can be like Jason, I've posted a solution to his latest foray into puzzledom here. If you missed the puzzle and want to try it, it's available here.
For anyone who wants to put a little FoxTrot on their cell phone, GoComics is now selling wallpapers directly on their site (previously you had to navigate through menus on your phone). They also have a comics viewer app that I'm not a huge fan of, but I guess it's handy if you're on the road and desperate.
Great news for any of you running the new Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Reader Vic Emond has put together a neato widget that loads the current FoxTrot strip onto your Dashboard screen automatically every day (he originally wanted to include an archive, but my syndicate isn't quite ready to allow that). It's free and automatically installs, assuming you're running Tiger (if you have "open safe files" disabled in Safari, you'll need to drag the widget app into a folder called "widgets" in your (user)/library folder).
A few readers have asked how to see the Google satellite pictures that Jason is so merrily enjoying in the strip. If you go to maps.google.com and click on the little "satellite" link in the upper right corner, you get satellite photos for any location you type in the search field. What's especially fun is that you can zoom in and out and use the mouse to drag the photos around. Don't do this if you have work to do...I wasted about an hour the first time I discovered it.
My recent series with Jason playing World of Warquest generated a lot of e-mails from fans of World of Warcraft wanting to know if I played. I do. And if you'd like even more detail, you might head over to Allakhazam, who've posted a full-blown Q&A with me along with copies of the strips.
A number of you budding web tycoons have asked me for an icon to use on your web pages to link to FoxTrot comics. Well, I finally got off my rear end and made one for you. All you have to do is copy the GIF image to your own folder of images for your page and include the usual HTML hyperlinking to http://www.foxtrot.com.
Sixteen-year-old reader Kyle Jones sent along these uber-cool 3-D renderings he made of Jason's Slug-Man character. Where were computer tools like this when I was a kid??
And reader "Tebok" sent along this 3-D imagining of Paige and Jason, which I thought was pretty cool. Definitely weird to see these characters as "realistic" people.
The brave souls at TechTV had me on The Screen Savers a while back and somehow managed to avoid having the FCC yank their license. I had a great time, and they were all really nice to this TV newb. They've posted the segment online in Windows Media format for those of you with strong stomachs.
I had a great time with family and friends in Yosemite recently. Perfect weather, lots of water in the waterfalls, cold beer aplenty, and I used all my tiles to make an eight-letter triple word-score word in Scrabble. Still, I couldn't shake the sense that my strip's deadlines were looming just over the horizon. I also got to see the unveiling of the new G5 Power Mac (cheese grater edition) at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, which was cool. Still, it was no Microsoft developers conference.
Category award winners included Darby Conley ("Get Fuzzy") for best comic strip, and Dave Coverly ("Speed Bump") for best comic panel. A full list of the winners can be found at the NCS website.
The good people at the Washington Post were kind enough to invite me to participate in their program of live online chats with the various cartoonists they run. For any of you who participated, you'll know how similar my typing skills are to watching paint dry. For those who missed it, well, you can always read the transcript if you're really bored.
New to FoxTrot? Want to catch up in a hurry? The treasury/anthology books are the way to go. You can still get my latest anthology through most bookstores, or by ordering online at either Amazon or Barnes and Noble. As I've mentioned before, this book sports a new dense-pack format that gives you more total strips for the same cover price, which is fun for me, too, since it'll keep my kids quiet for slightly longer stretches of time as they read. Here's a pic I took to show what I mean:
Several of you have e-mailed me about UComics' recent announcement that they would be limiting their free archives for FoxTrot and other comics to fourteen days. Deeper archives are still available, but they are now a part of their paid mycomicspage.com subscription package ($9.95 per year, I believe). Some things to know... First, UComics is a part of my syndicate, and as such I'm not free to move FoxTrot to another free comics site like UM's comics.com, for instance. Second, it's easy for us to demand free strips on the web, but we're not the ones writing the large checks each month to pay for bandwidth, staff and other overhead costs (don't include me...I haven't seen a dime). From what I'm told, and I have no reason to doubt, the trickle of ad money UComics currently gets doesn't cover this, and the choice for UComics was pretty much to re-jigger their business model into something that would stop the money loss or shut down entirely. I know it's no fun for comics readers, but if you think about the availability of free comics archives seven years ago (zero), two weeks is still better than it used to be.
Who knew the Soprano family started their Sunday morning reading FoxTrot? Just think, Jason Fox influencing the mob! It's a little fuzzy, since it's from video, but the strip Tony and AJ are looking at in this scene from the season opener is from Assorted FoxTrot, p. 127. It ran as a vacation rerun last November, which must've been when they filmed this episode. I'd post a link to the strip, but UComics' (cough) new archive restrictions make that difficult.
14-year-old Tyler Tibbel of Nova Scotia created this animated gem and was kind enough to let me post it. There's something about the eyes popping out that cracks me up every time. Thank you Tyler!
Reader Charles Brubaker passed along this delightful animated GIF he created. While it may not be violent or disturbing enough for those snobs running network television, it's more than suitable for inclusion here on the Bill Amend Web Page. Enjoy, and thank you Charles!
Ever wonder what a big-shot cartoonist does for fun on weekends when he's not touring with Bruce and the band? That's right, he ports games like Slug-Man. You can download the new OS X version here, or the old Mac OS version here. A big thank you to Apple for making their Project Builder and other development tools freely available to pros and hobbyists alike. This helped a lot. And an even bigger thanks to Mark Pazolli for porting the game Glypha III, which makes up the underlying code for SlugMan. I'd have tried to do it myself, but he beat me to it, which is just fine by me. No Windows version is in the works, so please don't ask. A project like that would be miles beyond my feeble skill set.
My daughter's class did a bunch of chalk drawings of iguanas in their school parking lot for Cinco de Mayo, which led me to make this faux chalk version of the FoxTrot.com background tile for my computer's desktop wallpaper. I figured I'd share it with anyone who wants it (click here to view it, then right-click (or control-click on a Mac) and save it, then tile it for your wallpaper).
Reader Buddy "KinkaJoy" Fischer passed along this great image generated by a raytracer program he'd written in Visual C++. It's based on my little Escher ripoff Quincy tile that I use on this site, if you can't tell. For those who might want a closer look, or to use it as a desktop wallpaper image, here are 1024 x 768 and 800 x 600 versions (instructions not included...the Bill Amend "tough love" approach to computer training (^8).
The classic card game Concentration in full FoxTrot glory. Created in Director 6.0 a few years back by yours truly. Match pairs of FoxTrot characters in as few turns as possible. My best score is 58, the best I've seen proof of is 52. Have fun!
(This game requires the Shockwave plug-in from Macromedia.)
For those of you who missed this effervescent little Shockwave game from the old Foxtrot.com site, well, I finally found where it was hiding on my hard drive and it's back. Can't say you missed too much. This is what happens when a cartoonist is left unsupervised for a weekend with too much multimedia authoring software at his disposal. Be sure to have the speakers nice and loud when you play this for the first time. 8^) And yes, the sound effects are real. Click here to play.
(This game requires the Shockwave plug-in from Macromedia.)
(She drew those hearts with extra affection, you can tell.)
Some of you may have noticed my books, beginning with Death By Field Trip, are smaller than past collections. This was done at my request to better accomodate my Sunday strips, which changed format a couple years ago. I've always hated the way Mutts and Baby Blues and Boondocks (which use this format also) have to juggle their Sundays around in the books to fit on the square page. A horizontal book works much better. We went with the dimensions we did to keep it from sticking out on the bookshelf, especially when placed alongside previous FoxTrot books. So what'll happen now is we'll put out a small book every six months or so until we've done three, then we'll have a big color treasury containing all those strips, similar to the books of the past. So while the small books have fewer strips than in the past, the treasuries will have slightly more than they used to. A couple people on Amazon have groused that this was a big ripoff move by Andrews McMeel, and I assure you, I had to haggle with my publisher for months to get this change through. It came down to the Sunday strip issue and a desire on my part to put more of a separation between collections and treasuries.
Also note we knocked $2 off the cover price ($10.95 down to $8.95) as part of the change.
Questions? Concerns? Have you checked my FAQ page? You'll probably just get an auto-response, but if that's ok, you can e-mail me here.
© 2006 Bill Amend
