I suppose that if these vets have been on deployment for a long time, they may not be au fait on the zebra mussels, in spite of the fact that they have been in our waters since the late 1980s. Anybody looking them up on Wikipedia or browsing online photos might get a feeling of dread seeing how they spread and cover so much territory and so many objects. Still, all of this talk of zebra mussel gloom and doom would have been fine in a Mark Trail story 20 years ago. But today, it’s like we walked in on an old episode of MASH.

Still, no problem is too old, too arcane, or too broadly based for Mark Trail to kick it in the gonads with his Boot of Justice. Or was that his Fist of Justice? Mark’s prior attempts to resolve problems in the old-fashioned Heroic Style of “rock’em sock’em” have not been impressive. Maybe he’ll finally get a chance to knock the living daylights out of at least one nefarious, crooked shipping company magnate. Or maybe the guys who deployed the anti-pirate firehoses.