April 01, 2005

Comic coincidence?

Cartoonists Bill Amend ‘84 and Darby Conley ‘94 are both Amherst alumni and creators of widely read comic strips with national circulation: Amend is the man behind Foxtrot and Conley is the creator of Get Fuzzy. Along with Stephan Pastis (UC Berkeley ‘89) and his “Pearls Before Swine,” the cartoonists shared something else today: all three of their comic strips centered on a ouija board theme. Conley is quoted in an Editor & Publisher article as saying

I can tell you that I wrote it. Some months ago, Stephan Pastis had run a very bad idea, which did involve an Ouija board, by me to see if it was funny. It was not. During that conversation, however, I gave him a brilliant joke to use for this idea, but he said that he wasn’t going to use it. Having written it myself, I decided to go ahead and use it in my strip. And you can ask Bill Amend about it, because I mentioned the whole thing to him that day, and he’d tell you what I just did.

Amend, a little more forthcoming about the episode, writes on his homepage that the three of them cooked up the joke together. The comics (copyright 2005 Darby Conley and Bill Amend, respectively):

april_fuzzy.gif
april_foxtrot.gif

Brian Meacham '97 | April 1, 2005 11:46 PM | Alumni