Bill's early childhood was spent principally in and around New England, with an especially memorable three years in Newton, Mass. This was when Bill first started drawing cartoons and spent every penny of his allowance on comic books and Mad magazines. These were his "Jason Fox" years, and he thinks back to them often in the course of writing his strip.
At age 12, his family moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where Bill attended junior high and high school. It was during this time that he began to contribute cartoons to various school publications, not always to great fanfare. His high-school paper wouldn't run one cartoon of his, for example, which featured as its punchline a puppy being thrown into a pit of hungry lions. The school counselor took a special interest in young Bill from this point onward. In addition to cartooning, Bill played tuba in the school band, made weird little super-8 movies (culminating in the epic 45-minute "Trek Wars," which boasted scenes so chock-full of homemade explosives that Bill really should have been arrested or killed) and, for a brief time, was president of the school math club until he was impeached. He was also an Eagle Scout and was active in his church, especially after the aforementioned brushes with explosive death.
Bill attended Amherst College, where he majored in physics. This is, as you might imagine, not the traditional course of study pursued by cartoonists, but it has allowed Bill to write those occasional math-oriented strips that maybe three people in the universe think are funny. In fact, he has a side-splittingly clever Schrodinger-equation joke lined up for this year's Mother's Day. While at Amherst, Bill drew editorial cartoons for the twice-weekly paper, co-published his own newspaper his junior and senior years, drank a lot of beer and began to think about pursuing a career in cartooning. Whether the beer played any role in these thoughts is unclear. So, when senior year came and all of his classmates were stressed out preparing resumes and grad school applications, Bill spent his days merrily doodling away.
Despite his plans to the contrary, however, the merriment didn't last long. Bill's early comic strip attempts were cruelly greeted by rejection letters from syndicates, and he spent the first couple years after college living with his parents and with no clear job prospects. It was very pathetic. He worked briefly as an assistant animator for a small company until he made the mistake of erasing and re-drawing a lead animator's work. Then he worked for a time at a movie production facility in San Francisco until he met a visiting Leonard Nimoy and figured the job could only go downhill from there. He continued to send comic strip submissions to the syndicates every now and then and eventually, after about four incarnations, FoxTrot caught the attention of the editors at Universal Press Syndicate. FoxTrot debuted on April 10, 1988.
Bill is now married and has a young daughter and son, and a middle-aged German shepherd.
