Bill Amend is one of us, we always knew it.
Check out this page, scroll down to see why Jason wanted to go to New Zealand.

Read his biography!

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 punch line 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

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. .