Darby Conley

Darby Conley's first cartoons appeared in the Doyle High Trailblazer, his school paper in Knoxville, Tennessee. His single-panel strip of weirdness won him first place in a News-Sentinel student cartoon competition in 1986, thus planting the idea of someday becoming a professional cartoonist.

He went on to earn a Fine Arts/Art History degree from Amherst College in Massachusetts, continuing to improve his Far Side clones for the Amherst Student, graduating in 1994. While a student in college, he played rugby. Conley was also a member of an all-male, jazz-influenced a cappella group, the Zumbyes.

Comics syndicate United Media agreed in 1999 to publish Conley's new strip Get Fuzzy about an anthropomorphic cat, Bucky, and dog, Satchel, living with their single young-male owner, Rob Wilco, which premiered on September 6, 1999. The idea for Bucky's character came from a friend's Siamese.

Awards

• 2002, National Cartoonists Society Award for Newspaper Comic Strip.

On October 30, 2003, the city of Pittsburgh served as the punch line of a strip about tourism destinations based on smells. Offended residents of the area deluged the author with negative feedback that included death threats.

A May 13, 2005 strip portrayed Boston-area sports reporter Bob Lobel as a drunk, prompting Lobel to file libel lawsuits against Conley and his syndicate.