'FoxTrot' comic strip to go Sundays-only

HOUSTON — "FoxTrot," the popular comic strip that runs in more than 1,000 newspapers, including the Deseret Morning News, will end daily production Dec. 30, as its creator joins the growing list of cartoonists to grow weary of the daily grind.

Bill Amend, who created "FoxTrot" in 1988, will continue to write and draw the Sunday strip.

"After spending close to half of my life writing and drawing 'FoxTrot' cartoons, I think it's time I got out of the house and tried some new things," he said in a statement. "I love cartooning , and I absolutely want to continue doing the strip, just not at the current all-consuming pace."

Aaron McGruder, Bill Watterson, Berkeley Breathed, Garry Trudeau and Gary Larson also have all either taken sabbaticals or ended their strips altogether, citing the grueling pace and challenge of maintaining originality and quality as factors in their burnout.

McGruder, who created "Boondocks," ended his strip in March for what was supposed to be a six-month hiatus. He had already handed drawing duties to a substitute artist while devoting time to developing an animated TV series for the Cartoon Network. The strip has now officially been canceled.

In earlier generations, the lives of comic strips seemed endless. After the original artists died or retired, successors continued the strips. That was because the characters and titles were owned by syndicates, the companies that distribute comic strips and other features to newspapers. The syndicates had the right to fire creators and replace them at will.

That began to change — at least for the most popular and powerful cartoonists — in the late 1980s.

Breathed started the trend.

"I had to quietly, secretly, threaten the comic pages' first walkout in 1989" to gain ownership of the copyright of "Bloom County" from Washington Post Writers Group, Breathed said in a 2001 interview with The Onion's A.V. Club. "It had never been done before."

A Houston native whose "Bloom County" became only the second comic strip — after Trudeau's "Doonesbury" — to win a Pulitzer Prize, Breathed ended the strip in 1989, at the height of its popularity. "Opus," his current strip, appears only on Sundays (including in the Deseret Morning News).

"FoxTrot," "The Boondocks," "The Far Side," "Doonesbury" and "Calvin and Hobbes" were all distributed by Universal, which since taking on "Doonesbury" in 1970 has attracted the most envelope-pushing cartoon features.