List of FoxTrot family members
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This is a list of FoxTrot family members from the comic strip FoxTrot.
Contents |
[edit] Roger
Roger Fox is the father of Paige, Jason, and Peter and the husband of Andy. Head of the household on 1254 North Elm Street,[1] he is forty-five years old and works as a B level manager (corporate slave in general) at the fictional Pembrook Corporation. He was born in Chicago and majored in English[2] at Willot College[3] (a parody of Williams College, the rival school of Bill Amend's alma mater, Amherst College).
Roger's incompetence and bad looks are running gags. Roger is an obsessed fan of golf[4] and chess,[5] but is bad at both of them. He frequently gets caught in sand-traps and loses balls in water hazards; the one time he made a good shot it turned out to be in the opposite direction from the hole.[6] In early strips Roger was a good chess player and frequently beat Andy, but his skills have gone downhill since. He owns an anthropomorphic chess-playing machine which goads him into playing and then beats and mocks him (in recent strips the machine has been replaced by the family computer).[7] Roger, described by Bill Amend as “still trying to catch up with the technology of the 1970s”, is bad at using computers in general. He has spent hours trying to put a floppy into a computer that didn’t have a disk drive,[8] spends three hours finding out where the on button is, and once caused his entire office to crash their computers while leading a computer training seminar. Roger’s boss, Mr. Pembrook, had chosen him to lead the seminar because of Roger’s excellent computer based reports, not realizing they had actually been completed by Jason.[9] In later strips Pembrook seems to have caught on and frequently piles assignments on Roger just before the weekend, so that Jason will edit Roger’s apparently mediocre work. Roger is no more successful in his frequent independent ventures than in his regular work. He has tried and failed to make money at day-trading,[10] online poker-playing,[11] and wine-making[12] and has only succeeded in leading himself further into debt. Envious of his more successful classmates after attending a high school reunion, Roger attempted to write a novel. The resulting spy thriller, which starred himself as a flawless James Bond figure, was so bad that Andy openly wept when the main character didn't die. Roger is a bad cook (he keeps having his grill go off like a rocket engine,[13] inducing a lot of smoke, incinerating burgers and burning off his eye-brows or skin with his attempts to barbecue), but an enthusiastic food lover.[14] Consequently, he is mildly overweight and is frequently nagged by Andy to eat healthily and exercise. Roger is very concerned about his lack of hair and has tried wearing toupees[15] and giving his hair pep-talks[16] in an effort to make it grow back. Otherwise, Roger is largely oblivious to his flaws. He enters each new golf game and each new business venture as confidently as the last and mistakenly believes that his children look up to and admire him. He once used a computer program to make a photo of Andy look more attractive and, when Andy retaliated by changing a photo of him into Viggo Mortensen, couldn’t see the difference between it and himself.[17] Aside from this, however, Roger is absymal at the computer. Andy spent hours telling him to point and click. When he clicked, he deleted all of her files. He also causes floppy disks to be destroyed, and claims that computer stuff is intuitive with him.
Roger tries unsuccessfully to involve his family in his interests. He drags Andy to the golf course at five in the morning and forces Peter to caddy for him, sometimes paying him something like a dime a hole or a dollar a game. He is frequently shown begging Andy, Paige, and Jason to play chess with him (the latter two sometimes demand that he pay them first).[18] Like the father in Calvin and Hobbes, he has poor taste in vacations and insists that his unwilling family accompany him on camping trips to their Uncle Ralph’s cabin, which is where they always go for their summer vacations. Recently, unable to afford his traditional family trip to Uncle Ralph's cabin, he made his children camp with him in their own backyard (Andy didn't attend, threatening to divorce.) He has also taken them camping in the desert (in August, during a record heat wave), to a fake Caribbean resort about 1,000 miles away from a real ocean, and to the mosquito infested "Skeeter Falls" (without bothering to pack any bug spray). The only time Roger ever took his family to a good vacation was Hawaii but only once.[19] At one time, he went on a business trip to Boonhurst, some kind of a dirt-cheap town in a un-named state which were hinted by Roger asking his corporate boss if they have paved the runway yet, and telling his wife that he has to stay at a "fleabag motel".[20]
Taxes are his ultimate bane. He often slaves away night and day on these, ending up with lots of beard stubble, complete with Jason always telling Roger about the math errors he often makes. Recently he attempted to do the taxes on his computer, and he computed a refund of several million dollars.
For all his faults, Roger is a loving and supportive father and much more tolerant of his children’s aggravating behavior than Andy is. He is the only member of the family who believes Peter is any good at sports and, when he found out Peter was actually a bench-warmer, still spent the entire game cheering for him, much to Peter and Paige’s surprise (although this could be because of his own cluelessness). His cheer of choice was "Rah! Rah! Peter!"[21]
[edit] Andy
Andrea "Andy" Fox is the mother of Peter, Paige, and Jason and the wife of Roger. She is forty-two-years-old and was an English major in college. Earlier strips portrayed her as a freelance writer or columnist for a newspaper.[22] Although references to her job crop up occasionally, they became more and more rare over the years until the point where she nearly appears to be a stay-at-home mother. Her children still turn to her (but rarely) for help on their papers and English homework. She has called herself "Andyana Fox" spoofing Indiana Jones for the various footballs, baseballs, and rockets she must dodge.
Andy is most often the straight man to her family’s antics but her efforts to control them and their addiction to television and the Internet are a source of humor in and of themselves. She has once bought a "Momvo"(a reference to the TiVo), wich keeps her kids from watching bad or violent shows, but threw it out when it wouldn't let her watch her soap operas. She makes them eat "seemingly-inedible" health-food (including lima bean cobbler, tofu curry, and beetloaf) which she either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that they can’t stand. She often nags Peter and Paige about their bad habits, like procrastinating on their homework, their lack of respect for Shakespeare, and literature in general.[23][24] A proud member of M.A.G.G. (Mothers Against Gory Games), she confiscates Jason and Peter’s violent video games and has once been offended that Donkey Kong does not wear pants. To some degree, she also seems to disapprove of their playing video games in general, as she deliberately buys computers unsuited to gaming. She also gives them "practical gifts" for Christmas such as thesaurusi. She refuses to “waste” money on heating and keeps the thermostat so low that it freezes soft drinks, milk, hot chocolate,[25] electronic devices,[26] steam rising from a cup of coffee, and oxygen.[27] She is extremely competitive with her own mother, one of the world's greatest cooks, who is less strict and more in tune with the family's tastes (especially in cuisine and gifts), so is therefore much better appreciated and respected by them.
Ironically, Andy has little restraint when it comes to herself. She scarfs down Halloween candy and Christmas cookies and has become obsessed with Bitty (Beanie) Babies,[28] the film Titanic,[29] the game Nintendogs, and many other things. She procrastinates almost as badly as her children, playing Myst and Tetris and watching soap operas when she should be writing her newspaper column.[30] At one time, she got hooked on playing Jason's Doomathon II, despite its gory and violent nature. Jason eventually had to trade the game away, since his mother wasn't paying any attention to anything else and he couldn't do his own laundry.
[edit] Peter
Peter Fox is Andy and Roger’s oldest child, a 16-year-old high school junior. He almost always wears a purple and white (wearing a different for school baseball) baseball cap with the letter A on it (a reference to Amend's alma mater, Amherst College; ) a grey sweatshirt, and blue jeans. During the summer, he often works at a movie theatre, where he cleans the bathrooms, collects tickets, wears movie supporting costumes, and has spent his entire paycheck on food from the concession stand.
Peter fantasizes about being a football/baseball/basketball star and about being the lead guitarist in a rock band like his idol, Bruce Springsteen. However, he is bad at both sports[31] and music,[32] getting cut from the team or made a bench warmer and tormenting his family with his horrible guitar-playing. He even once took to chewing tobacco, which probably didn't help much. Like his father, he is oblivious to his incompetence, believing that his coach’s insults are only jokes and brushing off his family’s attempts to stop him from playing his guitar. Peter is famous for his entirely insatiable appetite[33] and an extremely high metabolism comparable to Jughead in the Archie comics. He eats constantly and drinks special milkshakes in a failed effort to gain weight (usually in an effort to look more attractive at pools and water parks).[34] He once succeeded to gain weight when the pizza parlor had an all-you-can-eat campaign which he spent the entire night scarfing down pizzas until dawn and left being extremely obese, celebrating his victory in gaining weight. However, he lost all the weight he gained in only a few days and moped about it for a time.[35] His father and mother, who are always trying to lose weight, are envious of him, and Andy is frustrated that he takes seconds to eat the food that took her hours to cook. Other recurring gags include Peter’s frighteningly bad driving[36] and his ongoing dandruff problem.[37]
Peter can be callous, but often it is because he does not know that he is. He once tricked Paige into thinking she had a secret admirer and could not understand why she was so hurt when she found out it was a joke.[38] However, he can also take things deeply to heart, as evidenced by his emotion upon seeing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.[39] In very early strips, he was unpopular with girls but late in the strip’s first year he met and began dating Denise, who happens to be blind. He is a loving and attentive boyfriend, writing her mushy Valentine’s Day poems and once sacrificing his own grade on a test to help her study. He briefly broke up with her because he thought it was unhealthy for them to date only one person during high-school, but was talked out of it by Andy and, after much groveling, Denise accepted him back. At times, Peter tends to be jealous. When his girlfriend returned from a vacation in Italy, she kept talking about a guy named Guido. Peter assumed that he was a hunky Italian guy when Guido was actually just an old man being friendly.
Like everyone else in the Fox Family, (except for Jason), Peter is a total procrastinator. One of the running gags of the strip is how many inventive ways he comes up with to avoid doing his homework (like grouping all his study breaks into 1 long one), household chores or getting a job, (before he started working at the movie theater during the summer). At times, he'll only study on a subject long AFTER the test or even from last semester. Another running gag, one that he shares with his father, is playing out his fantasy of being a star football player, which pretty much frustrates everyone else who plays with him, (especially Jason).
[edit] Paige
Paige Fox is Andy and Roger’s middle child, a 14-year-old who recently became a high-school freshman. She is always portrayed with her hair in a pony-tail, although other characters sometimes suggest she changes her hair-style or claim she has changed it.[40]
Paige makes average grades in school but has poor study habits (though not quite as bad as Peter's). However, she is not very good at science, and needs Jason's help in math. She prefers shopping and chasing after boys with her friend Nicole to studying. In fact, it is her love for shopping, (or some might call obsession), which drives her parents and Peter up the wall, (due to her high-spending habits and making Peter drive her to the mall and suffer through 7-9 hrs of carrying her outrageous purchases). Her father normally doesn't understand the credit card bill which shows a series of purchases, then a series of credits, until Jason told him to think about how Paige is always forced to return nearly everything she buys due to their high price-tags. While she has no defined favorite subject, she is seen working for a school newspaper, and once dreams of herself being featured in embarrassing headlines in Journalism class, indicating that she may one day become a journalist. She once borrowed a copy of Great Expectations from her mother to smash a spider with, rather than use and potentially damage the copy of Cosmo Girl she was reading. When she found out during a trip to Washington D.C. that the National Mall was not a shopping center, she sobbed.[41]
During her frequent naps, she normally dreams about a dashing Frenchman named Pierre but in real life has only succeeded in attracting the class geek, Morton Goldthwait, whom she spends much of her time avoiding. Occasionally, she has bad taste in prom dates. One year, she went out with Chris Morrisey, the biggest sleaze in school, which Peter begged her not to go for her own good, suggesting all kinds of defense against Chris and one time made a threat against him. During the prom, Chris wouldn't stop hitting on her, forcing Paige to kick him. In the end, Peter said "I told you so".
She has tried learning to cook to attract boys but the food she makes is inedible (with often illogical substitutions) and the process of cooking it fills the house with smoke.[42] During Thanksgiving, Roger found his mouth glued shut after sampling some of Paige's pumpkin pie.[43] Another time, when she couldn't find baking soda, she substituted Diet Pepsi instead.[44]
Because Paige naps in class and procrastinates almost as much as Peter does, she sometimes hires Jason to tutor her and help her with her homework (especially in geometry). However, Jason often gives her incorrect, “joke” answers, such as telling her that Shakespeare's first name was "Chet". Paige is often scared of Jason’s pet iguana, Quincy.[45] Yet, on one occasion, she appears to only fear Quincy when Jason is around to be blamed. She yells at and usually hits Jason for bringing Quincy near her, but seems not to mind Quincy when Jason is gone.
[edit] Jason
Jason Fox is Andy and Roger’s youngest child, a 10-year old fifth grader with a somewhat omnipotent mind.
He is the smartest person in the family, and is often required to help Roger with his taxes and work assignments and Paige and Peter with their homework. Unlike his siblings, he WANTS to do his homework, and is often plagued, (as he calls it), with so much free time after finishing all of his schoolwork for the entire YEAR, within the first week! He's a master at chess and always devastates his father during games. He's also a genius in mathematics and science, often solving problems that are far too complex for his brother and sister, and even many adults. He is particularly gifted with computers, having created his own operating system, written a web browser before breakfast,[46] repeatedly hacked into government computers, as well as CNN in order to insult his sister, made a video game dubbed "0.000005 Life", a spoof of Half Life to only operate on his "iFruit" computer,[47] and once brought down the entire Internet with his “Darth Jason” computer virus.[48] He has an A++++ average in school, but aggravates the teachers with his overly complicated answers[49] and is frequently in trouble for disrupting class (often by not giving others a chance to answer, or worse, reminding the teacher of an upcoming math quiz, and later paying for it during dodgeball).
Despite his intelligence, Jason is often unrealistic. However, one must take into account that he's only 10 and still retains the youthful, though overactive imagination that many boys his age have. He does however, takes these flights of fantasy to the extreme for the most part. He thinks that the X-Files is a documentary and entertains many outrageous and unsuccessful money-making schemes.[50] He has developed plans for a dinosaur-themed hotel in Las Vegas, a skyscraper comic book shop, and an underground Star Wars-themed amusement park complete with life-sized Death Star ride and tried to sell his mother a photocopied sketch of his own comicbook super-hero, Slugman, for over a hundred dollars. He seems to believe that his parents can afford to give him thousands of dollars if he only begs them enough.
Jason spends much of his time tormenting his family. He frightens Paige with his iguana,[51] and plays numerous tricks on her of every sort, tampers with Roger’s food, and tricks Peter into taking unpleasant food related bets. Jason’s other hobbies include playing video and computer games such as Doomathon and World of Warquest, and making websites about and dressing up to attend The Lord of the Rings, The X-Files, Star Wars, Star Trek, and super-hero movies.[52] In one strip, he says that he likes Wikipedia, posting a picture of Paige under the warthog and rabies articles, a feat which fans of the strip imitated. Unlike his father and brother, Jason has no interest in sports and, despite their efforts, misunderstands basic sports concepts[53] (although he does play football with Peter from time to time). Jason takes the holidays very seriously, especially Christmas and Halloween. We often see him dressing up for these occasions. On Halloween, creativity, mischief, and candy seem to control Jason. He likes to slave away on Halloween decorations, mostly to irritate his own family. He can be either carving pumpkins or setting booby traps. The only thing he has a hard time with is choosing a perfect costume for him use trick or treating, usually with his best-friend Marcus.
Jason is a complete World of Warquest fanatic. He claims to average 7 hours of play every day, although he was supposed to only play for one hour on school nights (which means 22 hours on weekends). He has encountered many a comical antic throughout his gaming career; for one, his nemesis, Eileen Jacobson, tricked Jason in playing with him by disguising herself as a high-level male paladin who took Jason under "his" wing. Another time, Jason found an ultimate weapon inside a deep cave, but was disconnected before he could pick it up. His groans of dissatisfaction were audible for miles. Also, he got in trouble because he played all night against his mother's wishes. Jason's alter ego is a huge orc by the name of Grog Malblood. Recently, a beta expansion just opened and Jason wasn't invited to participate, causing him to believe that Blizzgames Entertainment (the developer of World of Warquest) has overlooked him somehow. He once turned into a girl (in his nightmares)[54]
Jason is best friends with Marcus Jones. When his mother catches them watching television, he finds loopholes in the way she words her warnings so they can watch even more television.
Although Jason claims to hate girls (and apparently still believes in cooties), he has a crush on Eileen Jacobson.[55] Jason has competed with both Marcus and Eileen for good grades but lost both times because of his overconfidence (although he usually gets better grades than either of them, which is perhaps where his overconfidence comes from). He acts queasy when he sees Eileen Jacobson and hacks into government computers to delete records of his calls to her to keep it a secret he likes her. He has gone on dates with her, however, without really realizing what they were. He has gone to an ice cream parlor with her once, held hands at the ice rink, and once admitted he liked her, leaving himself to spend two weeks trying to cover it up, hurting her feelings, and then trying to get her to like him again.[56]
As for sports activities, Jason is terrible at them. He can't even get the concept of the games right. One time, he and Marcus attempted to play baseball. Their ideas of the game were totally off the wall. They said players used a big, wooden bat (which what they had was plywood in the shape of an actual bat), confusing the term "hitting a tater" (a home run) as using an actual potato as a baseball, using their mother's good china as home plate, and their idea of the "batter's box" was a cardboard box. But the worst thing Jason has to be bad at, is ice skating. He is so bad at it, he loses control on the rubber mats that surround the rink. He does not particularly appreciate when Peter wants him to play.
However, Jason is not totally hopeless in sports. During a father-son outing, Jason played an excellent game of golf after he began looking at the sport like a physics problem. After being able to compute the shots, he played like a little Tiger Woods.
[edit] Quincy
Quincy is Jason's pet iguana. Unlike most comic strip animals, Quincy is not usually anthropomorphic. He enjoys chewing up Paige’s things (her clothes, her Backsync Boys photo, and even her ponytail) and vomiting on the carpets and furniture. Jason sometimes tapes a camcorder to his back and calls it the "Iguana-Cam" in which all videos eventually meet a disastrous end. He is afraid of cats, even small kittens. He owns an Iguana Ball which he got for a present but often ends up either falling down the stairs,[57] or getting kicked by Paige, who knows how to play soccer. He once choked on Paige's shoelace, but got saved by Paige.[58] Jason also uses him as the face of assorted characters, the most recent being Quincy's mother, who wanted to know how Quincy was doing in the family.
