Sometimes things happen that bring everything else to a halt. It’s usually when a loved one is lost or in peril…
In this case it’s Mark oldest friend, Andy the St. Bernard, who saved his life when they served together in WWII… We really have to apply time bending to this, though… We established that it’s 1981 and WWII was in the mid ’40’s so that makes Andy close to 50 (350-400 in dog years) and Mark in his 60’s… I guess we get to live forever in the funnies…
As Mark ponders how hollow the award would be without his Dearest Friend to share it with, Cherry has to wonder where she fits in the pecking order- Would Mark be nearly as conflicted and paralyzed if it was her fighting for life?
The Daily Trail 
I had forgotten how awkward Elrod sometimes was with drawing characters; as if each instance of Mark or Cherry, for example, was a new invention. Cherry literally towers over the grief-stricken Mark in the top strip; or maybe, Mark is shrinking from his anguish. Do we have some kind of ancient scale-of-importance symbolism going on here?
And if Andy was really so import ant to Mark, don’t you think he would have been beating the bushes over the past few days more than he supposedly did, rather than sitting home, spinning yarns and homilies? It just seems inconsistent to me. Yeah, I know this is reprinted from 1981 (during the time of my tragic post-graduate work), but it’s always “too late” for any of our comments to have any effect on the syndicate or the artist, since even today, strips are commonly produced weeks in advance.