What th-?
Are we pulling a Peanuts here? A Doonesbury? Are we going to start recycling all the old strips? Note the “Jack Elrod” in the first panel! Are we going to leave Marnie and Cartwright behind? So confusing…
And was Jeremy Cartwright James Allen? Probably. Let’s hope James got that “Drink he needed…”
The Daily Trail 
I for one, love this development. We’ll have good artwork and followable story lines. Hell, the strip will seem brand new because we’ve forgotten most of Elrod’s work anyway! Bring on the flapjacks.
They didn’t even get a new team for Spiderman, and we had hopes for Mark Trail?
Bleah.
Well, after poking around on the Net, it seems that Saturday was the LAST James Allen strip. Whether the movie story line will continue with a new cartoonist is up in the air. Nobody even seems certain if there will even BE a new cartoonist, or whether King Features Syndicate will simply distribute reruns, as we see with “Peanuts” and “Get Fuzzy”.
(Side note: Sometimes it’s hard to tell if a strip is repeated, as the style rarely changes and the jokes are repeated. I’m sure you call can come up with the usual suspects.)
Never mind rerunning earlier (non-continuous) strips for cartoonists who like to take sabbaticals. That didn’t used to happen, of course. The old strip “Maggie and Jiggs” (aka “Bringing up Father”), created by George McManus. He was famous for his half-year “sabbaticals”, but that was only because he drew an entire year’s worth of dailies and Sundays in the FIRST half of the year.
And gimme SOME points here: The strip really DID suddenly take a pivot to a brand new story, after all!
The strip did pivot. Bizarre look at Mark in a movie. We’ve been subjected to 2 plus years of 4 months story lines that go no where. At least with Elrod I can re-live my formative years. Like looking at the Andy Griffith show re-runs or Old Calvin & Hobbes. We can still celebrate why us folks follow this blog & the strip. Mark Trail wears no mask and it may be a relief to look at simpler times. Who knows what waits. Could be a new cartoonist or the oldies. We shall just see!