This article contains information on the central characters in FoxTrot, a comic strip created by Bill Amend. The strip centers on a nuclear family composed of mother Andy, father Roger, and their three children Peter, Paige and Jason, along with several auxiliary characters.
Main characters
Jason Fox Jason Fox is the youngest child of the family and is considered the nerdiest person in the family. 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, who sometimes make him pay them to do their homework, Jason actually wants to do his homework, and often receives incredibly high marks as a result (to the point that 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, and is frequently in trouble for disrupting class. Despite his intellect, he is shown to take most things too literally on occasion. (Once, when Roger asked him for "java", meaning a cup of coffee, Jason gave him a mug with a printout from the Java programming language.) 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 his ever being asked to order their pizza again was an "unlikely event"), and unsuccessfully makes attempts to get Roger and Andy to raise his allowance, which almost always results in sudden, sharp decreases in his pay.
Like most stereotypical boys, Jason is a constant source of mischief. He is always coming up with jokes, pranks and tricks which include water bombs, snowballs, dart guns, squirt guns 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 Pimple Command, Paige Invaders, Ms. Yap Man and Paige Don't Know Jack, on which she is respectively portrayed as a pimply, space alien, a constant talker on the phone and being 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 the Denise button dialed Andy's number instead). He also enjoys making comic strips with Slug Man (see below), substitutes for other cartoonists' work, e.g. Family Circus, or with his siblings as the characters, such as when he had a week of comic strips in which Paige was portrayed as a deadly monster (which resulted in Paige doing the same for him the following week).
Portrayed as a stereotypical nerd, he has an interest in science fiction, particularly Star Wars, Star Trek and role-playing games (primarily the fictional fantasy-themed MMORPG "World of Warquest", a portmanteau of World of Warcraft and EverQuest), 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 video games and 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 (including a search engine, which he built before breakfast) 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 worldwide 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 eliminated the Internet (and Jason's web company, "Jasonzonbayhoo") as a result. It is also shown that Jason is a terrific snow sculptor. When it snows he and his best friend 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 build 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 Marcus. In one series of strips, Paige plays one of his games and is more adept at it than Jason to his frustration, 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 Superman and Batman. Occasionally, Jason will make exaggerated plans of his own, such as a large-scale animatronics Christmas display (which has everything but a sound system playing "Jingle Bell Rock" all day) or a skyscraper comic book shop in his backyard (which is squashed by the zoning commission). 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 sometimes falls prey to advertising ploys, as illustrated in a 1991 arc where he becomes obsessed for a short while with The Simpsons products.
Paige Fox 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 ponytail. She enjoys shopping and will often demand that Peter drive her to the mall, sometimes using blackmail to force him into it.
Like the rest of the family, she has interests expected of her age group. Her obsessions include fashion, pop music (particularly boy bands and, in earlier strips, Madonna), modern fads and trends, and attractive teenage boys.
A running gag through the series is that she has a huge craving for candy and other sweets. For example, the ice cream man comes to her when she rings a bell and takes out his whole stock, asking Paige "the usual?". She has been shown to make a rainbow ice cream cone not by ordering rainbow sorbet, but instead by ordering seven different flavors in the colors of the rainbow, stacked in a rainbow shape in the right order on top of two cones. In an August 2013, strip she and Nicole suggest to a cupcake shop ideas for a pintcake, quartcake, 2litercake, and a galloncake, in case they ever wanted to expand beyond cupcakes. 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). She also appears to have an iPhone 4.
Although persistent in her pursuit of a boyfriend, she has almost never dated in the strip. A running gag is nerd Morton Goldthwait's interest in her, though she openly despises him. Paige has tried learning to cook to attract boys, but the food she makes is often inedible or burnt. One time, Paige burned all of her cookies so badly that Roger used them as a substitute for charcoal briquettes after Andy "directed him towards a stash." On another occasion, she used Diet Pepsi in baking Christmas cookies, thinking it was the same thing as baking soda. On yet another occasion, she burned the Thanksgiving turkey into charcoal with the oven's clean button, as the cookbook instructed her to "clean" the turkey.
Similar to Peppermint Patty from Peanuts, Paige often falls asleep in class, partly because she stays up late. She is slightly more diligent than Peter when it comes to schoolwork, but has had her own procrastination-related nightmares (like school starting two weeks early and getting a schedule with only math classes with quizzes every day). Paige will often ask Jason for help in homework, usually in the mathematics of geometry. However, he often gives her intentionally incorrect answers or charges her money in exchange for the correct ones. Paige also has difficulties with English class, particularly when reading Shakespeare.
Although she is not flabby, Paige is also shown to be in poor physical shape, not participating in any outdoor activities or organized sports, and the smallest amount of physical activity is shown to wear her out. She once auditioned for the school cheerleading team in an effort to attract boys, which ended in a debacle similar to Peter's attempts to join the baseball team.
Peter Fox 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 often seen with his hat on, even at odd times such as swimming. Peter has been seen hatless in places where it is blatantly rude to wear a ballcap indoors, such as church.
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 overnight by the Saturday strip.) He is also shown as a reckless driver, 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, attempting to clear a yellow light from six blocks away, almost sideswiping Andy's car, and going over the speed limit while parallel parking.
Peter is 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 months 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. As a result, he often crams homework and study into an all-night session (and once blasted the Hallelujah Chorus on his stereo to celebrate success). In desperation, Peter invented a high-caffeine concoction: coffee-tea (black coffee with a tea bag).
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 (and every other sports team, including girls' gymnastics). He even once had a dream of being a contender on the TV show American Gladiators but before the dream could be realized, he threw a muscle flexing in front of a mirror.
He is also seen as occasionally power hungry, especially when their parents are away, as shown in an early storyline in which he forced Paige and Jason to be his servants, baking him cookies, cleaning his room, and the like; before locking them in the basement for "mutiny".
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 named Susie Johnson only because she had Springsteen tickets, and during the Thursday strip, Peter touched Bruce's sweat. Since some of the earlier strips, Peter has been dating a blind girl named Denise Russo.
Andy Fox