Book Review: Foxtrot - Assembled with Care

Stars: 5 out of 5
Pros: Cartoonist wins Survivor!

Cons: That A++ Jason got on his math final lowers his GPA.

The Bottom Line:

Assembled for laughs

Pop culture and family life

Grins the whole way through

"If You're in a Jam, Call JAM."

Foxtrot: Assembled With Care is the eighth anthology of the great comic strip Fox Trot. But if you are worried that the strip might have been running out of ideas by this point, don't be. It's still as wonderfully funny as ever.

For those not familiar with the strip, it follows the members of the Fox family. Father Roger is a pencil pusher at a local company. (Have we ever learned more than that?) Mother Andy (short of Andrea) is a stay at home mother with a love of cooking tofu, lima beans, and other healthy food for her family to eat.

There are three kids in the family. Peter is a sixteen year old high school junior who wishes he could play on all the sports teams. Paige is a boy obsessed high school freshman. About the only character that is out of the box is ten year old Jason. Yes, the youngest loves to pick on his siblings, but he is freaky smart. He's solving calculus problems for fun after doing his homework. And he's a geek in every sense of the word. He counts the hours until summer vacation is over. He calculates the speed of falling leaves to trick his sister into getting it stuck in her eye. Of course, he often gets caught with his schemes against Paige because he's not smart enough to hide his work.

And we can't leave out Quincy, Jason's pet iguana. Paige is afraid of him, so you can guess how often Jason leaves him in Paige's room.

This particular anthology collects strips from three books and puts them together in one convenient package. The included books are Death by Field Trip, Encyclopedias Brown and White, and His Code Name was the Fox. It was also the first to switch to a slightly new format. Each two page spread features two weeks worth of strips. The six daily strips are in black and white, but the Sunday strips are still in color.

This go around, we get strips from Fall 1999 to Summer 2001. Many of the strips are individual jokes about daily family life. For example, Jason watches the trailer for the upcoming Lord of the Rings movies to see if they are cutting corners. (To his horror, it looks like they weren't using real undead ring wraths to make the film.) Peter attempts to ace his English class by using Cliff's Cliff's Notes. (Hamlet is reduced to "Danish prince dies." Sorry to spoil it for you.) And Paige makes flashcards so she's ready to start high school. (In case you wondered, the correct response to "Hi, Good Looking! What's your name?" is "Tee hee. Paige.")

But there are longer stories that last a week or longer. The family imagines what it would be like if Jason and his equally geeky best friend Marcus got cast as the lead hobbits in Lord of the Rings. Andy's mom visits for Thanksgiving. Jason rewrites "The Grinch" Christmas special with a new character, Mrs. Grinch who gives dictionaries and clothes for the holiday. Food-aholics Roger and Peter go grocery shopping. Jason and Marcus become detectives to find a friend's missing scrap book (and briefly call their agency JAM). Roger's mid life crisis leads to him writing a very bad novel. And the entire family goes on vacation to the "Isles of Fun-Fun Caribeanny Resort." Of course, it doesn't impress Andy that it is 1,000 miles from the ocean.

And there are the hidden jokes. This isn't always the case, but quite often, if you read the names of the magazines or newspapers, you'll see a joke. For example, Peter reads a bungee jumping magazine and it includes an advertisement for jumping from the St. Louis arch. And you wouldn't believe all the good fortune that the cartoonist their paper reports on has.

While many of the strips are timeless humor about family life, the strip has always found humor in the news. You've probably already noticed that I talked about the still in production Lord of the Rings movies. There are also jokes about Y2K, the 2000 election, and the last threatened Hollywood strikes. Personally, I've always loved these jokes, but they can date the strips. On the plus side, we do find out what really happened in Florida during the 2000 election.

Comic strip fans will remember this was the era where Charles Schultz published the final Peanuts strip and died. There are a couple nice tributes to him here as well as another funny switcheroo on April Fool's Day.

One thing I love about the strip is the fact that it continues to find humor in the same things. The characters never aged, and many of the set ups here have been used for years. And yet, the punch line is still fresh and funny.

Filled with sarcasm and exaggeration, Fox Trot makes me laugh every time I read it. Whether you are a long time fan or not, Foxtrot: Assembled With Care will have you laughing before you know it.