Webcomic / RayFox

RayFox is a Webcomic written and illustrated by Christopher "Scotty" Scott that has a futuristic and superhero-like motif to it; It currently has five chapters (the first one being in 2016) written so far and the series has a website of its own.

Raymond Fox is a reckless vigilante fox from Meva City in a world of anthro animals who either have special powers through either synthetic or supernatural means, are extremely skilled, or simply rely on species-related abilities. Ray possess the ability to manipulate heat and plasma energy, but is very clumsy with his powers and causes trouble for himself due to the destruction that follows his attempts to do good.

All of Meva City despises him for it, causing him to garner the reputation of an arsonist instead despite his intentions. After the law eventually forces him to join up with the S.O.S, Ray uses this opportunity to redeem himself in the eyes of the City's residents by working with the law to stop criminals.

In July 2023, Christopher decided to softly reboot the comic under the project name of "RayFox: Reignited".

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RayFox has the following tropes:

• 20 Minutes into the Future: Although a time period isn't outright stated for the comic, Meva city is shown to be a relatively advanced society with beings known as Metas. A Meta is a person with special abilities in the comic that are obtained by different means. Some Metas gained the title through species-related traits, while others gained it through powers (whether through genetic altering or other means), and others rely on weaponry/gadgetry. There are some Metas who got their abilities because they were just extremely skilled individuals.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Justified; Khali is attempting to save the lives of people on a train that Halberd cut in half. Given that he's holding it by the wires, he's unable to attack without letting it go and literally has no choice but to beg for Halberd to have mercy on them.
• All There in the Manual: The story is very rich in lore and how things work in the Rayfox Universe, which has its own page that’s currently in development but so far explains how the meta system works.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The world is filled with anthro characters of various qualities.
• Amusing Injuries: Ray literally set a Yak's groin on fire, by accident of course.
• Arrested for Heroism: Ray is tackled down by Summer and is arrested by the S.O.S right after having just saved the lives of the very officers who arrested him in the end of Chapter 2.
• Artificial Limbs: Arty has a robotic arm and leg.
• Atomic F-Bomb: Liev ends up having one of these the minute his mane poofs out. It only shows in the website version of the comic, but it's omitted in the book version and not shown in the Webtoon website.
• Badass Normal: Metas who are only classified as Ars tend to fall under this category; the most prominent example is Himura Asuka, the field captain of the S.O.S.
• Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Zigzag as the characters in the comic go barefoot, wear straps on their feet, or use footwear like shoes and sandals depending on their preference.
• Berserk Button: Don't call Asuka a raccoon. She's a tanuki.
• Big Brother Instinct: Inverted with Ray. He's nine years younger than Liz, but he has powers and is a better fighter than her. He's the one who faces Liev to protect his sister in Chapter 2.
• Big Guy, Little Guy: The antagonist pair of Chapter 3 are a huge bison and a small chameleon.
• Big Sister Mentor: As the only family Ray has left, Liz acts as a moral guide to him during his vigilante days as Blaze, advising him on being a hero and on how to use his powers responsibly.
• Boxing Lessons for Superman: Despite his fire powers, Ray is a good martial artist. Summer is also a good brawler and Asuka knows how to use her swords. Some meta heroes and villains also have martial arts skills and hand to hand combat training in their repertoire.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Arty is the doctor of S.O.S. in charge of healing everyone. He's also not above taking a nap in the lobby.
• Brought Down to Badass: Ray's cuffs in Chapter 3 act as a Power Nullifier that prevents him from fighting against the inmates with his fire powers. He still has enough martial skills to defeat a panther and trick him into slicing them.
• Cast from Calories: Metas require large amounts of calories to use their powers. Ray finds this out when he passes out after being a few days away from home cooking.
• Chameleon Camouflage: One of the assassins after Ray in Chapter 3 has this ability to make himself and others invisible. However, his camouflage disappears if he moves, allowing the prison warden Eli to detect and fight him.
• Character Blog: Ask Ray Fox, originally on Tumblr, now moved to Patreon and CuriousCat.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: The majority of metas simply have advanced training or have taken their animal abilities to extreme extents. Neo-mutants like Ray are incredibly rare.
• Clothing Damage: Played for laughs; Ray tends to be prone to this due to his powers, since they are fire-based.
• Code Name: Ray was previously referred to as "Blaze".
• Cool Big Sis: Liz acts like this to Ray, using her biology knowledge to check on her younger brother's health. She's also supportive and very affectionate.
• Cool Mask: Ray wears one when operating as Blaze.
• Covered in Kisses: Liz kisses Ray in the cheek multiple times in the first chapter to show her love and support for her little brother. Ray asks her to stop before Ally walks in on them again, implying that this is a regular occurrence. Jak does walk on them in the next panel, but his lack of surprise and their annoyance/embarrassment shows that he's used to this scene.
• Cunning Like a Fox: Despite his young age, Ray lives up to his species by being an effective vigilante. He can do research to keep track in a crime syndicate to figure out their next move and he can cover his tracks to prevent people for finding him. This results in Ray being Blaze for an unspecified amount of time until confronted by S.O.S. and Monroe in Chapter 2. Monroe found out his identity via a camera when an unmasked Ray saved Morales and S.O.S. figured out his identity thanks to Rose, who is in charge of intelligence.
• Destructive Saviour: Justified; Ray has little control over his powers as a meta, and as a result, it tends to set areas on fire, leading to colossal damage.
• Dope Slap: Asuka has one of her underlings give one to Summer in Chapter 2 if she kept bullying Ray despite quitting his vigilante days.
• The Dreaded: Carol is this to S.O.S. with Summer and Asuka fearing her wrath the most.
• Dual Wielding: Asuka wears two swords on her back.
• Emotional Powers: Ray's powers can be affected by his emotional state. He has created flames when angry, aroused, confident, and experiencing other strong emotions.
• Expressive Hair: Liev’s normally restrained mane poofs out a lot when he gets angry.
• Extranormal Prison: The setting of the third chapter, a prison designed to hold meta prisoners.
• Flash Step: Asuka does this a lot when she's using her swords, which makes her the strongest meta officer in the province. Her being a dual wielding swordswoman helps in her efficiency.
• Gasshole:
  • Summer burps when talking with Asuka in Chapter 2. The latter scolds her for that.
  • Asuka burps at Carol while drunk in Chapter 4. It earns her a beating from her supervisor.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Summer is a brawler, but she uses wrestling techniques (as seen in Chapter 3) and she prefers fighting with her legs than with her fists.
• Good Parents: Ray's father was this to him as he's the reason he wants to be a hero so badly.
• Goomba Stomp: Summer knocks out a snake inmate by jumping very high and stomping on his head.
• Gratuitous Spanish: Arty uses a couple of Spanish expressions in his dialogue in Chapter 4.
• Groin Attack: Ray nearly sets a yak's crotch on fire in Chapter 1 and then he gives a panther one in Chapter 3.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Carol is always in a bad mood because of her job in S.O.S. making her do lots of paperwork. She gets angry a lot when her co-workers don't do their jobs.
• Hated by All: Ray is hated by everyone in Meva City for his vigilantism bordering on Destructive Savior territory. Only Jak and Liz have a good opinion of him because they know him as a person. Part of the plot is Ray trying to subvert this by working as a hero for S.O.S.
• Heal It With Fire: Ray attempts to use his powers to cauterize a bullet wound, unfortunately Summer touches him while he’s searing hot.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Because of Power Incontinence and lack of experience, Ray ends up being a Destructive Savior rather than the hero he intends to be.
• Hot-Blooded: Summer, particularly prone to picking fights after being specifically ordered not to.
• In Prison with the Rogues: Ray is temporarily locked up with a bunch of meta criminals he got arrested in Chapter 3. Add in 2 of Liev's assassins (one whom's a chameleon capable of camouflaging himself and his partner), and it basically becomes a disaster waiting to happen.
• Kick Chick: Summer's first scene has her give Liev a flying kick. She then kicks Ray in the face, knocking him out after Asuka cuffs him. During Chapter 3, she does more kicking than punching.
• Morph Weapon: Based on what the Meta Database says about Natasha's gun, it apparently can turn into any firearm that she needs it to be.
• Mugging the Monster: The prison inmates think Ray is just a meta with fancy equipment that lets him shoot fire. They're all more than happy to get revenge on him when the assassins release them to go after them. They don't count that Ray can still fight without his powers and that he's a much more dangerous neo-mutant rather than a meta, which bites them in the ass when he gets rid of his Power Nullifier cuffs.
• Never My Fault: The chameleon assassin has this problem in Chapter 3, which makes his partnership with his fellow assassin much more troublesome. He attempts to shoot Ray despite a warden still being visible and his partner warning him about it. This leads to him being discovered and the two having to fight the guards, Ray, and Summer. After the fight is over, the chameleon complains about losing his gun to Eli and blames his partner for losing to Summer, rationalizing that he lost to a warden while his partner was bested by a rookie. They nearly get to blows for that.
• Nice Girl: Ally, Ray's crush is this.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: There are a couple instances
  • In the beginning, Ray ended up wounding more officers in his attempt to save one of them in the intro.
  • Implied with Summer; Based on Carol's scathing call to her, its revealed she tends to be guilty of this a lot, having gotten in fights when ordered not to and allowing two assassins to catch up to Ray in her attempt to subdue him.
• Ninja: Asuka fits this with her outfit, her weapon being two swords for Dual Wielding and her meta ability being a Flash Step attack. She's also a tanuki with a Japanese name.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Ray gets arrested a second time by Summer after his fight with Liev in the climax of the second chapter despite saving her and her underlings while doing so…Justified to an extent since his actions resulted in a lot of property destruction in previous incidents, he promised Asuka that he was going to quit being a vigilante earlier in the chapter, and him publicly revealing that he's Blaze means that they have to arrest him anyway. Played With as Ray's altruism despite everything Asuka and Summer made him go through in the chapter convinced the former to give Ray a chance of becoming a hero.
• Oh, Crap!: One inmate’s reaction after Ray tricks him into breaking his Power Nullifier cuffs in a fight, and he realizes that Ray is no simple arsonist.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Despite his operation as Blaze lasting three months, people only remember him for the Arsenal incident in Chapter 1. As Ray learns later in Chapter 4, there were ramifications that could have been avoided had he been better prepared.
• Parental Substitute:
  • Jak acts like this to Ray and Liz since their father is dead. He supports Ray's dream and trained him from a young age.
  • Asuka acts like this to Summer.
• Playful Otter: Rose is the first member of S.O.S. willing to welcome Ray. She also has a pool in her office and treats him and her friends to ice cream.
• Playing with Fire: Ray’s power, he can even burn through materials designed to contain plasma.
• Police Brutality: Happens to Ray a bit in Chapter 2. Summer kicks him in the face after Asuka restrains him. Asuka's guards beat him up when he starts making trouble upon waking up. Asuka cuts his ear to get him into a private room for a personal chat. And then Summer tackles him to arrest him at the end of the chapter following his fight with Liev. Most of them is Played for Laughs and the following two chapters have Asuka and Summer suffer repercussions for assaulting a civilian.
• Power Incontinence: Ray has little control over his powers as his father died before he taught him how to control them. It is implied that part of the reason that Ray became a vigilante was to get a better hold on them. Deconstructed, as while Ray is slowly getting better, he blew up an arsenal that permanently destroyed his reputation.
• Power Nullifier: Asuka places special cuffs on Ray that prevent him from using his powers in Chapter 2. He burns through them at the end of the chapter to fight Liev and has to wear another pair in Chapter 3, which are broken by an inmate. Then he wears another one in Chapter 4 for his trial that get removed after its over.
• Punch Parry: A weapon variant between Liev and Asuka when she saves Ray from him.
• Run the Gauntlet: Essentially this is what Ray and Summer end up doing in Chapter 3 against 100 prisoners, including Liev's two assassins.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Reconstructed; Ray saved the life of S.O.S officers even after Asuka arrested him and made him agree to give up his vigilantism, and although he was jailed for the destruction of property and defying Asuka's wishes, Ray's willingness to defy orders to do the right thing and save lives earned himself enough of her respect to the point that she went out of her way to convince Morales to release Ray to the S.O.S for recruitment, giving him a chance to earn the respect he deserves.
• Smelly Skunk: Liz complains to Ray and Jak about people thinking her to have bad body odor because she's a skunk in Chapter 1.
• Species Surname: Zig-zagged; Raymond Fox plays it straight, but some characters avert the trope, like his sister Elizabeth “Liz” Fox, who’s a skunk.
• Stern Teacher: Jak may be well-meaning and ultimately wants to see Ray be successful with his heroism, but it wont stop him from throwing Ray across a room and yelling at him.
  Jak: You need to get yer act together fast! I didn't train you to be this incompetant…
• Stuff Blowing Up: There are lots of explosions in the comic. Justified as Ray has fire powers with great explosive power and some Metas do have weapons that have destructive properties when they fight.
  • Ray's incident in the Arsenal ends with him making it explode rather than saving it. As a result, he becomes a Hero with Bad Publicity as many remember Blaze for for that case rather than his three months of vigilantism.
• Super-Soldier: Neo-mutants get their powers from a genetic modification program that doesn’t officially exist; hence the classification Geneticae. That Ray doesn’t have any idea who modified him or even what a neo-mutant is was a shock to the MA.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The comic is based on superheroes, but it's not shy around how law enforcement works, as seen with Ray's vigilante and the Wild Card antics of Asuka and Summer..
  • Played straight in Chapter 2 during Ray's arrest and imprisonment in the beginning of Chapter 3. Despite all the good he's done, Ray is still responsible for lots of property damage with his lack of control over his powers. He only gets his freedom when Asuka convinces Morales of his ability to make amends after a lengthy conversation.
  • Chapters 3 and 4 shows the consequences of Asuka and Summer's actions on Chapter 2. Their superior Carol has to deal with lots of paperwork because of how they handled Ray's arrest. Summer is on risk of being fired for assaulting Ray, manhandling him during arrest, and other infractions of past incidents. She's on risk of being fired, forcing her to work as a guard to make it up. Chapter 4 has Asuka getting punished by Carol not only for showing up drunk for work, but also for injuring Ray during her interrogation.
• The Syndicate: The Monroe Syndicate, of course.
• Talk to the Fist: Summer's first interaction with Ray was her kicking him in the face despite being cuffed.
• Team Mom: Asuka is this to Ray and Summer.
• Teen Genius: Ray is 18 years old and already knows enough about crime fighting to be a vigilante. He can monitor crime, investigate a syndicate, and hide his identity for three months. He was only discovered by a camera (Monroe) and the S.O.S. having an intelligence agent (Rose) that helped Asuka find him.
• Threw My Bike on the Roof: Morales paints Ray's actions as such in a tabloid article that had to do with the Meva Arsenal.
• Thunder Hammer: Liev uses the Rein Breaker, an extendable high-tech Warhammer, in combat that's capable of creating shockwaves upon impact.
• To Be Lawful or Good: A common theme in the comic regarding the heroes is whether they should follow the law or do what they think it's right. Each of them has their own interpretations of it.
  • Ray believes in doing good, hence why he started being a vigilante. He believes in the ideals of a hero like improving himself, teamwork, and saving others. However, he does want to become a hero eventually, implying that he's willing to uphold the law to some degree.
  • Summer struggles between this due to her hanging on a thread. Her Undying Loyalty to Asuka makes her follow her captain in her endeavors, even if she knows they'll get in trouble for that. However, she wants to follow the rules to avoid getting in more trouble, hence why she acts as a guard in Chapter 3.
  • Asuka is a firm believer of doing good over upholding the law as she was willing to let Ray go despite being Blaze if he promised not to be a vigilante again and later helped him to become a hero to continue his path. She can bend the law to her advantage, but she will uphold it if there's no other choice.
• Too Dumb to Live: Halberd really doesn't know when to fold em', and it ends up getting him smashed into a wall by Liev. It doesn't kill him though as evidenced by his eventual apprehension. He's not really the sharpest blade in the arsenal.
• Unfortunate Names: Boony and Halberd; it speaks for itself. The former is the subject of Ray's quips in-universe, and the latter is literally named after a weapon.
• Untrusting Community: The entirety of the Meva Province tends to think very lowly of "Blaze", and in turn, Raymond. Justified in that they're only told of the end result of the incidents and don't have the full context of what went on, so they can't entirely be blamed for their harsh attitude towards him...as for them not looking into details though? That's on them.
• Walking Swimsuit Scene: Rose has a pool on her office since she's an otter and likes to swim in it while wearing her swimsuit. She also meets Ray while wearing the swimsuit, forgetting she is still using it. Ray gets flustered and she gets embarrassed when he points it out, ruining her introduction.
• Wild Card: Asuka is the strongest meta officer in her province. However, she doesn't like following rules and would rather do what she thinks is right. She can do things like capture Blaze or fight evenly with Liev, but she will break protocol while doing so, leading to her suspension.

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