What kind of pie, Cherry? (That’s a pun. Sorry I had to point that out.)

Otherwise…. So Mark had a rough day, did he!? Compared with whom? Frankly, I think we readers are having a rougher day. Today’s strip is just annoying filler, saying nothing and contributing nothing. I really don’t want to simply throw bricks, but why waste your comic strip story and our time with this soap-opera dialog?

I truly hate to point this out, but, unlike panel 2, the drawings of Cherry in panels 1 and 3 look like some kind of strange marionette, with a head unnaturally attached to an oddly long, skinny neck. We used to see something like this with some drawing by James Allen, where heads looked like they were stuck on the front of necks, rather than on top. But here, the heads look like they’ve been taped onto posts.

I get that Rivera wants to expand the idea of this adventure strip to include a more family-centric angle and give more time to family members and normal interactions. Fine. But at the end of the day this is still an adventure strip, and for the past six weeks (since this new story began), we’ve not had any activity that could be classified as “action”, much less “adventure”. That’s six weeks just building up to getting to Portland. And we’re still not there, yet. And it seems I was overly optimistic about this story focusing on Rusty’s quest. Maybe he’ll get some attention down the road. It might be a long road, though.