List of FoxTrot family members

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This page contains information on the Fox family, central characters in the comic strip FoxTrot.

Contents 1 Roger 2 Andy 3 Peter 4 Paige 5 Jason 6 Quincy 7 References

[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 45 years old and works as a B-level manager at the 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 is a fan of golf^[4] and chess,^[5] both of which he plays horribly. (One time, he hit the ball across a water hazard only because the hazard was frozen solid.)

Roger has been described by Bill Amend as “still trying to catch up with the technology of the 1970s.”^{[citation needed]} Some examples are making Peter and Jason mow the lawn with an antiquated manual lawnmower (while everyone else has gas/electric mowers), buying into a Moby-Com 2000 Cell Phone (which happens to be the size of a small appliance and needs to be plugged in), and trying to figure out how to program a VCR (which includes getting on his knees and begging it to work). The most recurring gag is his total inability to operate computers in general. He has spent hours trying to put a floppy disk into a computer that didn’t have a disk drive,^[6] spends three hours finding out where the "on" button is, spent another couple hours trying to use the keyboard as the mouse, 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.^[7] In later strips Pembrook seems to have caught on and frequently piles assignments on Roger the night before they are due, 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,^[8] online poker-playing,^[9] and wine-making^[10] 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,^[11] inducing a lot of smoke, incinerating burgers, and burning off his eyebrows or skin with his attempts to barbecue). ^[12] His other attempts at food preparation is just as abysmal, (he can't even do scrambled eggs). However, he is a devoted lover of food. Consequently, he is mildly overweight and is frequently nagged by Andy to eat healthily and exercise (she points out he's not in good enough shape to watch basketball). Like Peter and work, Roger uses many inventive ways to avoid her attempts to make him exercise. Roger is very concerned about his lack of hair and has tried wearing toupees^[13] and giving his hair pep-talks^[14] 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.^[15] Aside from this, however, Roger is abysmal 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. His incompetence is well-known inside his family. In one story, Jason and Paige spilled a soda on the computer; when Roger turned the computer on, it beeped incessantly. This caused Andy to blame Roger for wrecking the computer, until Jason and Paige confessed.

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. At another time, he dragged Peter to the golf course during a torrential downpour. A recurring golf joke is Roger's penchant to buy 'state of the art' clubs to improve his scores, but he never succeeds and usually ends up spending large sums of money, (much to Andy's frustration). He is frequently shown begging Andy, Paige, and Jason to play chess with him (the latter two sometimes demand that he pay them first).^[16] 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.^[17] 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".^[18] During Christmas Roger often gets the kids the various gifts they want that Andy doesn't want them to have (usually with good reason). These have ranged from a jumbo dart bazooka for Jason, a guitar for Peter, and a credit card for Paige.

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!"^[19]

[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.^[20] 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. The stress of trying to keep them in-line or the result of their antics give her more gray hair and headaches. A joke in the strip is how fast she goes through aspirin or antacid. She has once bought a "Momvo"(a reference to the TiVo), which 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, depending on the joke (most likely it is the latter, since her children try all sorts of ways to avoid eating her meals). 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.^[21][22] 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. When Jason asked why they have a computer that's incompatible with 90 percent of the game he wants, Andy replies "Because none were incompatible with 100 percent". She often will only allow Jason to play his games if they'll help stop her husband's more annoying antics. She also gives them "practical gifts" for Christmas such as thesauri and give out things like organically-grown prunes for Halloween. She also has little grasp on her children's likes as when she had learned Jason liked dinosaurs, and so got him Barney school supplies. She refuses to “waste” money on heating and keeps the thermostat so low that it freezes soft drinks, milk, hot chocolate,^[23] electronic devices,^[24] steam rising from a cup of coffee, and oxygen.^[25] 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, and somewhat hypocritically, 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,^[26] the film Titanic,^[27] 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.^[28] 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, like his father he is bad at his interests like sports^[29] and music,^[30] getting cut from the team or made a bench warmer and tormenting his family with his horrible guitar-playing (his singing is arguably even worse). 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^[31] and an extremely fast metabolism comparable to Jughead in the Archie comics, or GPF's Fooker. 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).^[32] He did manage to gain weight once, when the pizza parlor had an all-you-can-eat campaign; he spent the entire night there eating pizzas until dawn and left being extremely obese, celebrating his victory in gaining 50 pounds (22.6kg) in weight. This weight gain didn't last, as his fast metabolism caused him to lose it all in only a few days; he moped about it for a time.^[33] 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^[34] and his ongoing dandruff problem.^[35]

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.^[36] However, he can also take things deeply to heart, as evidenced by his emotion upon seeing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.^[37] 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 the many inventive ways he dreams up to avoid doing his homework (like grouping all his study breaks into one long one), household chores (like waiting for all the leaves to fall off the trees before raking them, then secretly gluing the last ones), or getting a job before he started working at the movie theater during the summer (although the latter may have been motivated by a desire to avoid getting a job altogether, rather than merely reluctance to work on it). At times, he'll study for a test his class had the previous day - or even the previous semester. When he does study, he typically relies on the Cliffs Notes. As such, he often does poorly in school; he receives a 66 on his test (which he misread as a 99 due to the paper being upside down), and an English teacher laughs at the irony of him having an "A" on his cap before handing him a final for which he has not adequately prepared. 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.^[38]

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 (some might call it an 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 hours 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 (Andy once said a sweater Paige bought "cost more than {her} college tuition"). 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.^[39] Her idea of Christmas music involves material references (Money Money Money by ABBA, Material Girl by Madonna, and Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend).

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. Paige apparently has a very high view of her looks. This is clear when Morton doesn't ask her to a winter dance. When Andy asks Paige to put her self in Morton's shoes she adds wouldn't she eventually give up asking her if the answer was always no? Paige responds "Not if she were me"! Occasionally, she has bad taste in prom dates. One year, she went out with Chris Morrisey, the biggest sleaze and chauvinist in school. 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, constantly activating the smoke alarm.^[40] During Thanksgiving, Roger found his mouth glued shut after sampling some of Paige's pumpkin pie.^[41] Another time, when she couldn't find baking soda, she substituted Diet Pepsi instead.^[42]

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.^[43] 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. Despite hating Quincy, Paige may like cats and dogs; she asked for a cat and a dog once (despite her ulterior motive that Peter and Jason were allergic to cats - it is implied that she is not) and dressed as a dog for Halloween, prompting Jason to insult her and another time she dressed up as a cat for Morton's halloween party.

[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 most intelligent 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 (especially physics), 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,^[44] repeatedly hacked into government computers, as well as CNN in order to insult his sister, made a video game dubbed "0.0005 Life", a spoof of Half Life to only operate on his "iFruit" computer,^[45] and once brought down the entire Internet with his “Darth Jason” computer virus.^[46] He has an A++++ average in school, but aggravates the teachers with his overly complicated answers^[47] 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.^[48] 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, Slug-man, 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. His greed for money is so great that if someone flips a coin into the air he will jump for it.

Jason spends much of his time tormenting his family. He frightens Paige with his iguana,^[49] 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, Jurassic Park and super-hero movies.^[50] 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^[51] (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. One year he set so many booby traps that he "had trouble counting that high". 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 a day on weekends). He has encountered many a comical antic throughout his gaming career; for one, his nemesis, Eileen Jacobson, tricked Jason into playing with her by disguising herself as a high-level male paladin, Sargent "Neelie" (Eileen backwards), 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 Glog 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.

Jason is best friends with Marcus Jones. When his mother catches them watching television or playing video games when they are not supposed to do so, he finds loopholes in the way she words her warnings so they can continue. When they are forced to play outside, they often act out video games, or pretend to play on the computers.

Although Jason claims to hate girls (and apparently still believes in cooties), he has a crush on Eileen Jacobson.^[52] When Tomb Raider rose to popularity, a strip had him agonizing over wanting to play a game with a girl as a main character, which he had not done since a Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine in his past (which he was very ashamed of). Jason has competed with both Marcus and Eileen for good grades but lost both times because of his overconfidence. In Eileen's case, he did not study as much as normal, and got a marginally worse score. In Marcus's case, he succeeded in writing an extremely long essay, but did not do well. 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.^[53]

Jason is terrible at almost all sports, and is often unable to perform basic techniques or understand the concept of the games themselves. He and Marcus tried to play baseball using plywood models of bats instead of baseball bats, and making mistakes that lended themselves to puns. Jason is also bad at ice skating and cannot control himself on the ice (and according to one strip the rubber mat surrounding the rink!). He does not particularly appreciate when Peter wants him to play (or practice his checking).

However, Jason is not totally hopeless in sports. He seems to enjoy golf during a father-son outing, and is a significantly better player than his father (mainly because he sees golf as a big physics problem). Furthermore, after being urged to take up a sport by his mother, Jason was actually interested in archery, but had to give it up, since Paige was his usual target, and she kept destroying his bow. As he stated, archery was fun but it was expensive to keep buying the equipment over and over.

Jason is fluent in Klingon.

[edit] Quincy

Quincy is Jason's pet iguana. Unlike most comic strip animals, Quincy is not usually anthropomorphic. One major thing many people notice about him is that his expression on his face never changes. People talk to him, laugh at him, pick him up, and even tickle him but he just sits there looking at the person never talking or showing emotions. In earlier comics Paige is scared by just looking at him but in newer ones Paige is not as scared but still screams when he is on her. He does not usually walk by himself except when he is in his iguana ball but expects Jason to pick him up. 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. Quincy is afraid of all cats (regardless of size), even small kittens. He owns an Iguana Ball which he got for a present but often ends up either falling down the stairs,^[54] or getting kicked by Paige, who knows how to play soccer. He once choked on Paige's shoelace, but she saved his life — a fact unknown to Jason.^[55] 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 (as well as to annoy his family), as well as Don Iguan, a reptilian Romeo. The Strip never shows how Quincy and Jason met but many people believe that Amend is focusing their outline based on Calvin and Hobbes because there is no strip that shows how Calvin met Hobbes^[56]and when Amend was asked about it he said that Quincy is only important as Jason's pet so there is no logical reason on why he should make a strip about their introduction.

[edit] References