…the fact that only the most stalwart will continue to run with this strip.

When a single day takes over a month to play out, (than you andysowner) it suddenly becomes all to apparent why one gets the feeling, the hope even, that quicksand would deliver a sweet release…

One also assumes that the eruption is being felt throughout the island chain and it’s not unlikely that Cherry by now has put down the umbrella drink, thrown on her cover-up, and sobered up enough to ask whether the US Geological Survey might deploy its considerable heft (no doubt they have their own standing army by now) and rescue her husband (and what other life forms without a comic strip named for them) from the disintegrating island… This would be consistent with other “crescendos” where the Federal Government is the only possible point of resolve for these long walks we are being asked to endure.  I guess the self-reliant, vigilante Mark Trail died with Mr. Elrod, too…

Seriously?  it has been reduced to conflating onomatopoeia?

And for those of you keeping track, we started rumbling for real on October 31st…  although the foreshadowing began weeks before that in the chopper ride to the island.  I try to avoid personal attack in my comments, but this is just plain laziness on the part of our scribe and author, who was entrusted with this franchise but now continues to bore and disappoint.  Happy Monday, all!!

I mean, they are standing there staring down a wall of moving molten mantle matter with presumably no place to escape other than over the cliff from whence Mark just rescued Abbey…

Note the tree all aflame in the panel near Mark’s head… I’m sure that’s an interesting phenomenon watching the lava issue forth and items in its path reaching a level of spontaneous combustion… like a tree that had, only seconds before that, been alive and vital and full of life force… Mark and Abbey better take a cue from that before they both spontaneously combust…

…lightning fast reflexes, and superhuman strength that allows a single hand to arrest a human body’s worth of falling momentum…

We apparently missed a small sound yesterday that would have allowed us all to sleep a little better last night!

So with that (almost) over with, (let’s all assume that she doesn’t pull Mark over the cliff with her,) we can continue to follow the “flip book” action that will no doubt carry us into the New Year…

Only in the Trailverse could someone go head-first over a cliff, only to suddenly be descending feet-first…  and declaring to Mark and the world what is happening.  The only thing missing here is Abbey referring to herself in the third person…  “Abbey Powell trips, slips and is falling over what appears to be a cliff.  This is nothing new for Abbey Powell… Abbey Powell has survived worse falls…”

So… will Mark Join her, like the last time?  Will the fall distance allow Abbey to reach terminal velocity and have her break both legs?  Stay tuned boys and girls, for we never know what will happen next!

Ever have one of those dreams that seems to last all night?  Even upon waking and returning to sleep you pick up where you left off?  That’s what this “story line” is reminding me of…  At least now the grass is green and the lava is flowing red, unlike in previous scenes where the lava has been gray…  And now it looks as though Abbey has regained the lead in the race to get off the island…

…in time to cash in on the always-available trope: Abbey is a woman and therefore clumsy and prone to tripping over things…  of course she’s been without glasses since the Boar/Tree incident, and we’re pretty sure she needs them to see with clarity.

It would appear that the entire island exploded in the second panel.  Maybe James Allen is trying to tell us something… like he’s sick and tired of Mark Trail and it’s “time to move on here, people…  nothing more to see…”

To think it all started with a wealthy, white yacht-owner and his penchant for fires made with real logs.  Not caring a lick about his “footprint,” ecological or otherwise, he set in motion a chain of events that would lure the likes of a millennial do-gooder and a sucker for anything that would take him to his next “story.”

…or at least the alarms have gone off… One would suppose.

I appreciate the comments!  Yes, that damned Finch has no doubt taken flight, the Ants are going to be toast, the lost civilization will be lost for real, and the last installment made it look like Mark’s back was erupting…  reminding me of the movie Gremlins, and how they reproduced…  if you got one of them wet, baby gremlins would erupt off its back.

Now it appears as though they will have to leap across a fiery chasm in order to make it out…  despite the fact that they are mere strides away, this should resolve by Friday…

Forgive me for getting sucked into this protracted and only moderately interesting story arc, but when Mark utters his now familiar UUUNNNGGH!, you know he’s in trouble.  Our intrepid USDA agent seems to have found the way out and Mark has been slowed to a crawl (or a coughing crouch…)

The silhouette in panel one is reminiscent of Christ on the cross, which is also reminiscent of the Willem Dafoe character in the 1986 movie Platoon… Panel three could be taken from any one of the many Bruce Willis Die Hard(er) vehicles…

Like Jeff Spicoli in Fast times at Ridgemont High?  Or “Whoa” as in “Stop?” Speaking of “Whoa,” I recall that I started  club in one of my old neighborhoods when the kids were young and all parents would tend to gather on a Saturday night while the kids played capture the flag or jailbreak or some other backyard game… The club was called “WHOA” which stood for “Worthless Husbands of America…” a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that Husbands/Fathers never do quite enough in this world… We thought it was funny, but the wives didn’t appreciate the joke, as I recall…

As Abby completes her transformation into a dude and exhibits broad jumping over fire skills, Mark is left for dead in the fiery mess.  But it’s about time that Mark started taking direction from someone else…

While many of the other strips are leaning on the holiday for content, Mark Trail remains timeless, oblivious even, to what’s happening in th real world.  So despite the goodwill that generates as people gather to celebrate and renew family ties and invite new friends into the fold, we are left to witness the cruel forces of nature at work as new crust is formed from the molten contents of our geothermally active planet.  Oblivious to current events, that is unless all this KABOOMING is a long, drawn-out metaphor for the recent Presidential election, but I digress…

So here’s to you all, all residents of the Trailverse, on this Thanksgiving Day 2016.  May your blessings be many and your day spent well.  BOOM!

…the island.  Remember that iconic line from the series Lost? Uttered by would-be-strong-man Benjamin Linus?  I think it was two winters ago I needed a binge-worthy series to make it through the cold, dark northern winter.   And Lost it was…  I had totally avoided the show in real time, when it was the subject of so much water-cooler speculation and morning-after  palaver…  But to consume an entire season in one weekend… to not have to wait a week between episodes, suffer through commercials, get teased by the scenes from an upcoming season… well, I was totally Lost myself…

So it appears that Mother Nature is having Linus-like thoughts about the “unstable atoll” overrun by Red-imported-fire-ants.  This is one way to reset the clock and take care of an unwanted infestation.  But much like the Cave-saga that (supposedly) centered around White-nose Bat Syndrome, the reason for going to the atoll has been quickly forgotten as terror and doom befall our main characters.

Bets on whether there will be another explosion in tomorrow’s installment?

As Abbey Powell, Peace Corp Vet, Anthropology Major, Adventurer, begins to break down for lack of breathable air, it’s Mark Trail that falls in behind her and gives her that last push to “get to the beach” where salvation awaits… or so they think.  Must.  Keep. Moving.

As Hell-fire continues to rain down upon them, I am reminded of another reference I heard on the radio…  what’s it raining?  It’s raining tacos!  You’re welcome.

Really.  I am on pins and needles.  not.

The Tedium-Meter® is back in full…

No use being an idiot.  This strip ain’t named for you.  Mark has survived worse scrapes, and well, you have visions of the ‘Nam coming back to you.  You saw too many of your brothers get taken out in the searing heat of a firefight to know that running toward the danger only gets you kilt…

So as Cal continues to channel Jim Brown, head down arms and legs pumping (thanks, George A…) he heads for the boat… of which wee have only seen the bow… I mean, what’s it packing in the back?  a motor?  will Cal be rowing?  sailing?

And what about that random reference to the movie The Fog?  The wreck of the Elizabeth Dane?  Was that just a head fake?  That was, of course, months ago in real time, when Abbey was awaiting Mark’s arrival.  For those living in the Trail Matrix, though, mere hours…

As Abbey assumes a ‘duck and cover’ posture, what exactly is Mark doing?  Heaven only knows…

Ever wonder where the expression “heads up!” originated?  I have always thought that funny, especially when applied to, say, a baseball diamond.  A foul tip goes high in the sky, some unsuspecting person is about to get beaned, and someone yells, “heads up!”  The person looks up, and instead of catching the blow on the top of their head or shoulder, the ball crushes their nose or eye socket…  clearly not a better outcome.

So as Mark leads the way with his skinny jeans and flexing gluts, let’s hope Abbey can find her way, as she seems to be overwhelmed by the raining ash and cinder…

Give it a rest, Abbey.  Seriously.  And by now do you know to NOT call Mark Trail unless you want hellfire raining down on you?

Color palette continues to be very curious… lava has turned from ash gray to black now, which is a bit disorienting.  But at least in the third panel, Mark and Abbey are in synch as far as pumping their arms and moving their legs…  How surprised they will be to find that the Chopper, Cal, and Abbey’s boat are all gone!!  Ha!!  Too bad Mark had a witness at the Island Hoppers Charter service, otherwise, Cal could just forget about the whole thing… but of course he’ll need to bring the insurance company out to the atoll to make his own claim…  why do all these stories involve destruction of property and insurance claims??

The lava flow has taken out the already damaged fire ant mound…

And this is important because, well, we’d probably all be sitting up at night wondering whether the ants survived the eruption…  I can tell you I would have been.  But really?  Installments past suggested that the volcano and resulting caldera were miles away- off on the horizon.  It wasn’t like Mark and Abbey were at the foot of the mountain that just blew its top.  Well, I guess that lava flows quickly, much more quickly than any story line in the Trailverse…

…while running at full tilt is impressive.  Even to the point that he can hearken back to the past (well for us, anyway, it’s been weeks…) and recall the incident involving the Wild Boar…  and now realize that the boar meant them no harm, it was simply escaping with its life… damn the singular of boar that was left to incinerate… true- that’s what a group of wild  boar is apparently called…

So… Boar smarter than Trail.  Not surprising.  If Mark had an ounce of brains left in him, he wouldn’t constantly be placing himself in mortal danger…

…but not in the Trailverse…  it flows gray.

Not to mention the plume.  Lava Orange and not gray.  This is more than my ‘half a cup-o-coffee’ brain can handle at this point…  sort of like red is blue and blue is red these days…  Not even sure what I meant by that… maybe up is down and down is up?  Or maybe how can a tiny little atoll suddenly become Krakatoa?

And as was pointed out in earlier comments, the lava flow is the least of Mark and Abbey’s concerns as the suffocating gasses (at least in real life) would have consumed and asphyxiated them by now…

So as Mother burps, choppers are destroyed, and people run…