This page contains information on the central characters in FoxTrot, a comic strip created by Bill Amend. The strip centralizes on a nuclear family composed of mother Andy, father Roger, and their three children: Peter, Paige and Jason, along with several auxiliary characters.
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Roger Fox is the father of Peter, Paige, and Jason and the husband of Andy. According to the strip, he is 45 years old and was born in Chicago, Illinois. Roger has also stated that he majored in English studies[1] at the fictional Willot College.[2] He works at Pembrook and Associates. Roger's occupation is an unspecified white-collar office job, although his coworkers and his boss, Pembrook, have appeared in the strip.
His hobbies include golf,[3] camping, and chess, though he has almost no talent at any of them (or virtually anything else he attempts). He often tries to involve his family in his interests, usually by taking them on vacations.[4] He is also portrayed as being highly out of step with modern technology, especially computers.[5] Many strips also show that he is overweight, balding and in poor physical condition, to the point of his tires sinking just by him sitting inside his car, and despite his wife's attempts to get him to eat healthy foods and exercise, he rarely does so. It is noted that he is not very smart, like when he spelled "Relief," R-O-L-A-I-D-S (quoting an old television commercial) and when Jason dug up Roger's college diploma from the attic and it was signed, "Orger" (hence the reason Roger locked it away from plain view). It is also shown that Roger likes looking at the pictures of supermodels all over Peter's wall, much to Andy's dismay. Similar to Peter and Paige Fox, he was also a procrastinator, and during High School, he sometimes pulled all-nighters studying for a test by drinking coffee, splashing cold water on his face, and even playing really loud music if the previous two attempts didn't work (although Andy Fox implies while his son is trying similar methods that the last bit got him expelled from three fraternities).[6] He also has some trouble with giving Christmas presents, as he once mixed up the family's Christmas gifts due to exhaustion[7] and confusing Jason's request for Cash and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots for a Walk the Line CD and four solid metal gears, respectively.[8] Despite being rather clueless at times, he can be clever in some matters. He fares well enough as a family man and clearly cares for his wife and children, once he quit his job when Jason busted his chin, he went back after he realized he made a mistake. He also seems unable to light and cook on a grill, usually resulting in a giant pillar of fire coming out of the grill.
Andrea "Andy" Fox is the mother of Peter, Paige, and Jason and the wife of Roger. She is portrayed in the strip as a 42-year-old mother. According to the strip, she was also an English major in college. Her own love of education makes her entirely unsympathetic to her two older children's typical hatred of school and homework, which she expects them to love as much as she did. While earlier strips portrayed her as a freelance writer and columnist for a local newspaper,[9] references to her job were gradually dropped and she has mostly been portrayed as a stay-at-home mother.
Andy often prepares exaggerated vegetarian or vegan meals for her family (most often tofu, eggplants, spinach, beets, etc.), much to their chagrin, but she continues to try to get them to eat what she believes to be healthier meals. She often criticizes her husband and children for what she sees as their bad habits, such as procrastination[10][11] and use of improper grammar. She has been known to impose her will and beliefs rather harshly on her family, including Roger, such as occasions when she refused to buy coffee because she believed him to be "addicted" to it, and instructing Jason to play video games to prevent Roger from watching Super Bowl pre-game programming. This has also shown her to be something of a hypocrite as her attempt to use a Momvo to restrict her children's shows ended when it wouldn't record her Soap Operas. She is shown to be easily stressed-out over such matters, and as a result highly ill-tempered at such times. Portrayed as a cheapskate, she tends to consistently keep the family's thermostat down during the winter months to save money, often cold enough to freeze hot drinks, oxygen, and several liquids in the house, in one strip it was so cold the family computer literally froze. (in one strip, she also replaced the family's telephone with a telegraph and shut off the family's cable TV). She sometimes becomes obsessed with video games that she will not allow her children to play, such as Jason's Doomathon II game.[12] Andy has also been shown to obsess over certain other fads, such as "Bitty Babies" (a parody of Beanie Babies), the movie Titanic, and the Nintendo DS game Nintendogs.
Andy's unnamed mother (the grandmother of Paige, Peter and Jason) has occasionally appeared in the strip as well. The grandmother is often referred to as "perfect"; as a result, Andy often feels inferior around her, and will try to prove herself by competing against her mother (usually by trying to cook a meal as well as her mother can).
Peter Fox is the eldest child of the Fox family. A 16-year-old high school junior, he is regularly shown wearing a blue/purple and white baseball cap with the letter A on it, as well as a grey hooded sweatshirt and blue jeans. Occasionally, his cap has an "H" instead of an "A", but only as a benchwarmer for the high school baseball team. He is only seen to take off his hat in the first few books.
He is also depicted as having an exaggerated appetite, but is frustrated that no matter how much he eats, he cannot seem to gain any weight (except in one series of strips, where he gained 50 pounds at a pizza joint's all you can eat pizza night, then losing it by the Saturday strip.)[13][14] He is also shown as a reckless driver,[15] once claiming to have "flirted" with four-digit speeds. Peter has pulled many stunts with the family car, such as speeding, back-wheelies, deliberately spinning and fishtailing, driving so fast that zero-gravity was achieved, almost sideswiping Andy's car, and going over the speed limit while parallel parking.[16]
Peter is also portrayed as a procrastinator, and one of the running gags of the strip is the many ways he dreams up to avoid doing his homework or household chores. He once bragged that he was "sick of homework from day one" in response to Paige claiming that she's starting to get sick of homework barely two weeks after the start of school, as well as becoming two weeks behind on schoolwork only one week into the year, a fact he seems to be proud of. He also shows interest in sports, but is constantly shown to be inept at both football and baseball. This has been demonstrated by his name being preprinted on the list of people cut from the football team.
Peter also holds other stereotypical interests for an adolescent male, including swimsuit models, video games, and guitar playing. He is known to be an avid Bruce Springsteen fan, once dating a girl only because she had Springsteen tickets. It is sometimes shown that he has a calendar with pictures of Cindy Crawford. Since some of the earlier strips, Peter has been dating a blind girl named Denise Russo. He often teases Paige about her Freshman status and criticizes Jason's ideas. It has been revealed that he knows CPR.
Paige Fox is the middle child of the Fox family. A 14-year-old high-school freshman, she is always portrayed with her hair in a pony-tail. She enjoys shopping and will often demand that Peter drive her to the mall (often through threatened blackmail of photos of him and his girlfriend, Denise), much to his chagrin.
Like the rest of the family, she has interests expected of her age group. Her obsessions include fashion, pop music, modern fads and trends, and attractive teenage boys, a running gag through the series is that she huge craving for candy and other sweets. She shares her obsessions with her best friend, Nicole (see below). Paige often has sleepovers at Nicole's house to avoid Jason's pet iguana, Quincy (see below).
Although persistent in her pursuit of a boyfriend, she has almost never dated in the strip. In fact, the only boy interested in her is nerd supreme Morton Goldthwait, whom she despises, although in one strip, she was asked to the senior prom by Chris Morissey who, Peter claimed, was the biggest sleaze artist in the school (Peter was subsequently proven right when Chris tried to force himself on Paige and only stopped when Paige threatened to mace him). She also was invited to a senior's party where the host, Mitch, asked her to go to bed with him, to which she refused. Paige has tried learning to cook to attract boys, but the food she makes is often inedible or burnt (and with illogical substitutions, such as Diet Coke for baking soda). She has also been shown to not be able to tell the difference between her own cooking, even if it's freshly baked.[17] One time, Paige burned all of her cookies so badly that Roger used them as a substitute for Charcoal Briquettes after Andy Fox "directed him towards a stash."[18]
Paige makes average grades in school due to her poor study habits, though hers are not quite as bad as Peter's. She will often ask Jason for help in homework, usually in mathematics. However, he often gives her intentionally incorrect answers, or charges her money in exchange for the correct answers. However, Jason has honestly helped her with homework issues such as data retrieval when she accidentally deleted her report in Macbeth. She has been shown to fall asleep in class (often due to staying up too late), and regularly takes naps at home as well, and often sleep through most of the day during the summer strips. In some early strips, Paige would dream of a Frenchman named Pierre, who would attempt to impress her in a variety of extravagant ways, although Jason and Peter always interrupt and change the course of her dream, often involving Quincy. Like Peter's pictures of swimsuit models, Paige has 90210 posters all over her wall.
Jason Fox is the youngest child of the family and the strip's protagonist. A 10-year-old boy who wears glasses (though his pupils are unseen), he is shown to be very intelligent, and is often relied on to help Roger with taxes, or Peter and Paige with homework. Unlike his siblings, Jason wants to do his homework, and often receives incredibly high marks as a result (72 correct answers out of 20 questions is disappointing to him). He sometimes is disappointed when he has no homework because he did all the homework for the year in the first week of school. He tends to aggravate the teachers with his overly complicated answers[19] and is frequently in trouble for disrupting class.Despite his intellect,he is shown to take most things literally (When Roger asked him for Java Coffee, he gave him a mug filled with printed javascript). He also once placed an order for a pizza with "17/51 cheese, 109/327 sausage, and 86,499,328/259,497,984 mushroom" (which resulted in Roger receiving all his change in pennies and telling Jason that him ever asking him to order their pizza again was an "unlikely event"), and unsuccessfully tries extreme ways to get Roger and Andy to raise his allowance, which almost always results in sudden decrease in his pay.[20]
Like most stereotypical boys though, Jason is a constant source of mischief. He is always coming up with jokes, pranks and tricks which include water bombs, snowballs and other contraptions, Paige being his favorite target. She is also the center of his insults, like when he came up with a "Slug-Man" superhero comic, which included "Paige-o-Tron" as the villain, or uploading games to his website which included "Paige Invaders", "Pimple Command" and "Paige Don't Know Jack" in which she is portrayed as unable to answer the easiest of questions. Although Paige is his regular target, Peter is sometimes the target of his tricks (such as reprogramming the auto-dial buttons on Peter's cell phone, resulting in Peter accidentally confessing to Andy about sneaking out, when he thought he was taking to Denise).
Portrayed as a stereotypical geek, he has an interest in science fiction, particularly Star Wars and role-playing games, as well as a high level of knowledge in mathematics and science. He also seems to have a high interest in comic books and dinosaurs. In a few strips, it is revealed that he likes Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, as well as the fictional "Linuxmon", blending his interest in programming with card games, and brings them to school. Jason is also a frequent user of the family computer, and has been shown to be an amazing programmer, repeatedly constructed his own computer programs and viruses, which he often sends to the other computers in the house and Eileen Jacobson. He also has written at least two viruses that caused nationwide havoc, called the "Darth Jason" and "I-Don't-Love-You-Eileen-Jacobson". He included a copyright line in the latter, and in the former he completely eliminated the Internet as a result. It is also shown that Jason is a terrific snow sculptor. When it snows he and Marcus build monsters out of snow to scare Paige. Another example is a storyline in which Andy tells him to go outside instead of playing video games, so he and Marcus built the environments of their favorite video games to play in). In addition, he plays video games regularly — either by himself, with Peter, with Roger, or with his friend Marcus (see below). In one series of strips, Paige played one of his games and was more adept at it than Jason, with common sense assisting her. He frequently attempts to recreate the work of cartoonists while they are on hiatus, usually as an excuse to make fun of Paige. He also makes his own comic called Slug Man, a parody of Batman. Occasionally, Jason will make exaggerated plans of his own, such as a large-scale animatronics Christmas display or a skyscraper comic book shop in his backyard. Like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, Jason is shown to have a fear/hatred of girls (see below), but admits to slightly liking one of his only female friends, Eileen Jacobson. He often falls prey to advertising ploys, as illustrated in a 1991 arch where he became obsessed for a short while with "The Simpsons" products.
Quincy is Jason's pet iguana. Jason regularly uses him to tease Paige, either by waving the iguana in front of her, putting him in the bathtub while she is taking a bath, or throwing him on her; other times he will let Quincy into her room so he can chew up her belongings, usually throwing them up at some point, and in one panel, Andy said, "Would it kill you, to start the day with a smile?" Paige then replies, "I do!" with her sweater chewed up. At other times, Quincy just sits on Jason's head.[21] Quincy's species has never been revealed, but it is possible that he is a Green Iguana (Iguana iguana) of a smaller size. He has talked only once, in a strip where Jason built a Spider Man Web Launcher, and his mother said "Comic books aren't real." He denies this, and Quincy replies "Jason, listen to your mother." (As a gag to what Andy had said, see above.)