Some Clever Title: A “FoxTrot” Collection. By Bill Amend. Andrews
McMeel. $18.99.
Mother Is Coming: A “FoxTrot” Collection. By Bill Amend. Andrews
McMeel. $18.99.
There is no shortage of nerd comics
online. The best of them is xkcd by
Randall Munroe, but others also have much to recommend them, such as SMBC (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)
by Zach Weinersmith. However, in the days before there were any Internet comics, or even any
Internet in the sense in which we know it now, there was one comic strip that
fearlessly (OK, maybe fearfully) carried the tattered banner for science geeks
everywhere. That was Bill Amend’s FoxTrot,
which dates all the way back to, believe it or not, 1988. FoxTrot was an unusual mixture of hoary suburban-family humor with
highly sophisticated (especially for its time) play with math and physics
concepts (Amend has a degree in physics). The strip had the usual three-kids
suburban family: feckless father whose inability to light a simple barbecue
grill was a recurring thematic element; down-to-earth mother whose obsession
with healthful eating was her
recurring theme; older, sports-focused high-school-age brother; early-teen,
fashion-obsessed sister; and math-and-physics whiz kid brother whose antics
quickly became the focus of the strip and its most unusual element by far.
FoxTrot
was genuinely funny, and Amend skillfully walked a fine line between too much
geekiness for the strip to resonate with non-nerds and too little for it to be
distinctive. And it is not quite fair to speak of FoxTrot in the past tense, because it is still around. But it is
scarcely the same: Amend discontinued the daily strip at the end of 2006 and
since then has produced it only on Sundays – during years when the newspaper
industry, where FoxTrot thrived, has
shrunk to near-unrecognizability and papers’ comic strips have shrunk along
with it. The antics of father Roger, mother Andy, and kids Peter, Paige and
Jason have continued in much the same vein in the years since FoxTrot became a once-a-week offering,
but the strip’s continuity has disappeared, and it would now be quite difficult
for someone who has never read FoxTrot
to piece together its underlying approach from the Sunday-only strips.
It is worth trying, though, at least when
those strips appear in collections such as Some
Clever Title and Mother Is Coming,
which allow readers to absorb and enjoy more than 130 of the Sunday appearances
per book and get a sense of the characters’ personalities somewhat akin to what
readers of the dailies used to obtain. The mixture of FoxTrot themes has not really changed very much. Some strips offer
traditional suburban-family humor, as when Roger announces that he put the
charcoal in the grill upside-down and flames burst through the bottom of the
unit, or Roger tells Peter about his plan to climb a ladder and lean out far
enough to cut a tree branch that is next to a power line – asking Peter to talk
him out of doing it. Or Paige carefully selects sherbet by color until she has
eight scoops held in an arched rainbow shape between two cones, announcing that
this is her way of getting rainbow sherbet. Or Andy has “the talk” with Paige –
not about sex, but about Paige’s desire to have her mom stop posting on Paige’s
Facebook wall. And that Andy-Paige talk is also a mild version of the real
heart of the strip, which involves the many ways in which Jason confuses and
upsets and occasionally charms family members and/or readers through knowledge,
behavior and antics that have very definitely kept up with the latest trends in
nerdiness.
For example, Jason is a longtime World of Warcraft devotee (as is Amend),
and the game makes fairly frequent appearances that will mean little or nothing
to the uninitiated. Jason is a comic-book fan as well, and readers need to be fans
themselves to understand a strip such as the one in which a super-long arm
stretches past Jason and others who are standing in line for a cartoonist’s
autograph: “Wait your turn, Reed Richards,” Jason says, and if you do not know
that is the name of super-stretchable Marvel character Mister Fantastic, the
strip will be unintelligible. Some Jason behavior is a bit more mainstream, as
when he and friend Marcus create geographical features such as Lake Jason and
Marcustown National Park in the hope that Google Maps will be taking satellite
photos at just the right time. Then there are the references to TV series such
as Dexter, about a blood-spatter
expert who is also a serial killer: Jason pours cran-grape juice into a topless
blender, turns it on, and analyzes the resulting kitchen splatter patterns as a
tribute to the show. Or take Game of
Thrones: it provides the title of Mother
Is Coming as well as cartoons in both these collections. And then there are
the math strips: Paige has her rainbow sherbet, but only Jason would ask for
ice cream in a hexagonal prism, dodecahedron or ring torus rather than an
ordinary cone. And only Jason would bring math tests with perfect grades for
show-and-tell – a different perfect one every time. And it takes Jason’s mind
to come up with “trig or treat,” in which he and Marcus maximize their Halloween
candy haul by telling people “you can either give us lots of candy or listen to
us do trigonometry problems.”
To be sure, FoxTrot has plenty of non-Jason humor, and some of it is really
first-rate, such as the strip in which Peter discovers the apps that Andy, who
is a writer, has on her phone: Instagrammar, Angry Words, Pendora, Nouncloud
and Prefacebook. That entry is both nerdy and
suburban-humor-y – a rare combination and a delightful one. FoxTrot itself is a rare and delightful
combination of comic-strip tradition with the pioneering spirit of a strip
whose focus on math and science was trailblazing 30 years ago and remains
unusual even today. Some Clever Title
and Mother Is Coming may not entirely
make up for the absence of continuity that FoxTrot
had as a daily offering, but these full-color collections show just how good
Amend still is, even at reduced frequency (insert pun relating to
electromagnetic radiation here).
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