Do I want to rehash this past week? I’ll try to do it quickly:  Mark and Friends, having been discovered with their hands in Cricket Bro’s cookie jar (i.e laptop), escaped from the corporate HQ in their hybrid, only to be chased, once again, by Professor Bee Sharp and his hired muscle, Diana Daggers. Daggers has an unexplained, psychotic reaction to Mark, whereas we are left still trying to determine exactly what this whole storyline is about, except for the actual theft of private property by Mark and Company. Racing (if you can call it that) in their Prius along the highway at night, the intrepid band of naïve justice warriors figured out how to get away by simply turning off their car lights and making a left turn…in the dark. Though chasing directly behind the hybrid, Sharp and Daggers somehow lost them. Blogger Joseph Nebus offered a possible scenario on how this could have occurred if the roads were arranged in a certain way; only that Rivera did not have the room or a way to show this, thus making it look downright silly. And Sharp and Daggers looked plain stupid. I’m still open to having this entire story turn out to be a drawn-out bad dream Mark is having. But, moving on….

One thing these Sunday strips do show is how decent an illustrator Rivera can be. She continues to be inventive with her title panels, today’s being composed of bear prints. Sunday panels have a larger format than dailies, so it is easier for Rivera to add detail and colors. As most Sunday strips are printed in color, readers get to see how Rivera uses color, rather than ink, to suggest volume and light. In fact, her Sunday panels are more “painterly” than many other Sunday strips, though there are others, such as Prince Valiant. People who only see the dailies in newspaper black and white may be more disappointed in the art, given that there is visually little evidence of shading, save for black areas.

Otherwise, an interesting subject today:  An “extinct” sub-specie of brown bear. Well, good for raising the public awareness, anyway. Attempts to “re-introduce” this bear into California appear to be centered on so-called back-breeding, cloning, and genetic engineering. After all, if the sub-species is extinct, you can’t simply just drop in any brown (grizzy) bear and call it good. Or Californian.

Still, I’m not sure what the link is between the California Grizzly and, presumably, climate change; or what kind of hope and change Mark refers to. But I’m just a dumb guy from Viginia and open to the suggestions!