Martha Lorraine

Personally: Martha, like most dogs, is very energetic, but does get grumpy at times when Skits or someone irritates her. She is nice, but usually likes to get her way.

Appearance: Martha is a mutt, meaning she is a mixed breed of many dog breeds. She has mentioned, Labrador Retriever and Pitbull in the show. Her collar is red with a metal I.D. tag. Her ears are a darker brown than the rest of her body. She has white on her paws and muzzle.

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Relationships with Family: Helen: Helen is Martha's owner, and Martha admires her a lot. They are best friends, even thought they get cross with each other once in a while.

Skits: Skits is Martha's adopted brother, and they are very good friends. Sometimes they fight, like over a toy or food, but they are mostly friends. When the Lorraine family got Skits, Martha was a little jealous.

Jake: Martha and Jake are generally good friends, Martha cleaning up Jake's spilled food and helping him speak. Jake was once scared of Martha's cone but never has any problems with Martha herself. He also can say "dog" and almost say Martha's name.

Mariella: Martha will call Mariella anything from "Mom" to "Mariella" to "Mrs Lorraine". Although sometimes Mariella shouts out Martha's name angrily and/or tells her off when Martha does something wrong, Martha does care about Mariella and they have a good relationship. Martha does care about Mariella as evidenced when she tried to flag down vehicles when Mariella was in labor[1] and to do favors for Mariella in My Mother, the Dog.

Daniel Lorraine: Their relationship is neutral. Sometimes, Danny yells at Martha.

Lucy Lorraine: Martha likes Grandma Lucille and wants what's best for her, but they do conflict a bit due to Lucille's neat freak tendencies. Martha calls her Grandma Lucille, even though she is not Martha's grandma.

Martha's Mom: Martha and her mother got on very well as puppies, and, as with her siblings, the mother licked and suckled Martha and told her to use her bark to get what she wanted. Martha was a bit clingy to her mother, which meant she didn't get adopted on the same day as her siblings, and when Martha got carried away by the river, her mom thought she'd run away. Now, they still get along.

Skipper: Martha and Skipper get along fine, although not much is known about their relationship.

Cam: Martha and Cam get along fine. She and Mack helped find Martha's mother.

Caruso: Martha and Caruso get along fine, but not much is known about their relationship.

Mr. Felix: Martha and Mr. Felix get along fine, although she does think it's a bit odd that he's outgrown playing in the mud.

Star: Martha gets along very well with Star and saved her at the last second when a delivery truck nearly ran her over. When the driver opened the door and looked back, Martha barked angrily at her, proving that she cares about Star's safety.

Mack: Martha and Mack get along fine. She and Cam helped her reunite with her mother.

Sarge: Martha and Sarge have a bit of a sibling rivalry, due to Sarge being a bit intimidating, but they don't hate each other.

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Relationships with Friends: T.D.: T.D. and Martha get along very well, because they have mostly the same ideas about certain things. Martha has attempted to teach T.D. to talk dog at his request.

Alice: Alice and Martha's relationship is neutral. They don't fight, but they don't converse too much.

Truman: Martha and Truman seem to trust each other a lot and be great friends.

Francois: Martha finds Francois a bit annoying and sometimes gets jealous of him, mostly because he is demanding and because she once got the blame for something he did. Despite this, they are good friends and help each other when doing dog stuff together.

Carolina: They have generally a neutral relationship. Carolina sometimes finds Martha a bit annoying but that's just because she doesn't understand dogs very much.

Rinty, Cisco and Bert: These three are all very good friends of Martha's. They have a relationship which could be described as "chummy". When the four of them, plus Ruby, Francois, Skits, Miranda, Estelle, Pops, John and the puppy triplets are together, Martha calls them "the pack".

Miranda and Estelle: They met at the pound and look up to one another, but their relationship is not explored very much.

Pops: They met in the pound. Martha once noted that "he's elderly and we get along just fine".

Butterscotch, Streak and Mandarin: She met these three in the pound too. She is good friends with them but finds them a bit hard to understand as sometimes as their barks are hard to make out, which Martha thinks is because of their young age.

Kitten: Their relationship started off bad because Martha was prejudiced against cats. However, when Kitten nearly got run over and Martha taught him how to cross the road, they became buddies and he helped her shed her prejudices, which led to her helping her dog friends shed their own prejudices.

Polly: Martha can find Polly a bit annoying, saying rude things like "you need help!" to her, but deep down, they are friends, as evidenced when she helped teach Polly words.

Mrs Demson: These two, although they have worked together in the past, usually have an antagonistic relationship as Mrs Demson doesn't like animals and has a hard time remembering Martha's name, and Martha is scared of Mrs Demson.

Nelson: She just doesn't like him for some reason.

Bob: Martha and Bob's relationship is a mixed bag. Martha initially saw the good in him and called him a good dog, but she is intimidated by him. Ironically enough, she refers to him as "not so good" in There Goes the Neighborhood.

The Lee Family: Before she knew Milo existed, she didn't like him as she thought Skits was more interested in his "imaginary" friend than his real friends. Likewise, before his dad Terrence knew Martha existed, he didn't like her very much as he thought T.D. was making up stories about talking dogs. However, when they met, they became very good friends. Martha also cares greatly for Lily, as evidenced in The Puppy Tooth Fairy.

The Parkingtons: Martha didn't really interact with them up until Martha Gets Spooked, when Mrs Parkington thought Martha's voice was that of the ghost of her deceased great-aunt who is also named Martha. Martha also borrowed ingredients off of the Parkingtons in Martha Bakes.

Kazuo: Martha and Kazuo get along fine, although when he first found out that she could talk, he had trouble understanding. He was the one who found her as a puppy and eventually got her adopted.

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Biography: Martha was the third born in a litter of puppies in an alley. Despite being a bit scared of her brother Sarge, she really enjoyed living in the alley. Her mother raised her puppies alone, and despite not naming them (calling them by their birth order instead), she was a good mother. She always made sure the family got enough to eat and drink and told her puppies that they are dogs, not cats, and to use their barks to get their way. When a delivery truck nearly ran over Martha's youngest sister (Star), Martha barked at the driver, who adopted their family. When Martha and her siblings were weaned, they got taken to the animal shelter. Kazuo was off that day and his cousin was working his shift. Martha's siblings all got adopted but Martha didn't because she was clingy to her mother. The next day, the boy next door tried to cross a wonky bridge over the river. Martha barked at him, saving him but got washed down the river and landed on the road. Kazuo, who was driving by, picked her up and took her to the shelter. Her mother didn't know about this and was sad as she thought her daughter had run away.[2]

At the shelter, Kazuo named her, and she enjoyed living there but wanted to be adopted. One day, the Lorraines visited the shelter, intending to buy a cat. Helen, who was six at the time, spotted Martha and instantly wanted her, but Mariella said dogs were too much work and they eventually didn't get a pet at all. Soon after, two robbers adopted Martha and used her to retrieve objects from a store and a museum so as to rob them, but they ended up getting arrested and Martha was sent back to the shelter. Helen had been drawing pictures of Martha and been quite bored, so Daniel went and adopted her to cheer little Helen up. Since then, Martha and Helen have been best friends.

As a puppy, she used to have problems with wetting the floor and carsickness, but she outgrew them. She also never chewed items or jumped on things. She was known for having more energy than most dogs her age.

Approximately three years later, the Lorraines went for a drive in the snow but their car went down and, coincidentally, Mariella, who was pregnant with Jake, went into labor two weeks premature. Martha barked at vehicles to flag them down and get Mariella to the hospital.[3]

A few months later, Truman Oatley from next door was visiting the Lorraines and eating a lunch of alphabet soup with Helen. When T.D. showed up, Helen wasn't allowed to play with T.D. until she'd finished her lunch, but she was in a hurry so she fed it to Martha, who said her first words later that evening, which shocked the whole family. Over the next week, Martha learned to use the phone, but the Lorraines got annoyed of Martha talking at inopportune times and Helen told her that she sometimes wished Martha never learned to speak. This hurt Martha's feelings and she stopped eating the soup, which led to her losing her voice, but when a cat burglar tried to rob the Lorraines' house, he fed her alphabet soup to keep her distracted but then she got her voice back and arrested them, which led to Helen apologizing.[4]

Soon after, Granny Flo took half the letters out of the alphabet soup, fired the people who made those letters, and changed the slogan to "letters in every can", which resulted in Martha's speech patterns becoming indecipherable, so she ran away and found herself in Al's house, where Al fed her a bowl of alphabet soup with all the letters and they went to talk to Granny Flo, who re-employed the people and got the soup back to normal.

Some time later, the Lorraines got a doggie door and T.D. gave the Lorraines Skits to cheer Helen up after Helen didn't like her drawing. Despite sometimes squabbling or getting jealous of him, Martha usually got along well with Skits and taught him a few basic rules.