For some reason, Cherry thinks that being new in town means finding a graphic novel here must be somehow different than finding one in a bookstore in another city, such as New York, Chicago, or London.
Rivera and the staff at Books With Pictures must know each other well enough, since the owner of the real bookstore is really named Katie. However, I’m pretty sure that Professor B. Sharp (seen here channeling Genie from Peewee’s Playhouse) is not part of the staff. Why he just happens to be here at this particular time is another mystery that looks like an old TV sitcom cliché.
When we last saw this joker (Is he even a real professor? I’m thinking not.), he was fleeing from Cricket Bro’s ridiculous attempt to create NFTs using him and a goat.
Alas, Rivera likes her little ensemble of weirdo-troublemakers and is content to keep recycling them, rather than creating new opponents. But really, how hard is that? There was that shipping magnate and his staff, for example. They had the potential for some really good back-and-forth, but nothing came about it, and they just steamed away.
The Daily Trail 
This oblique, poorly defined, half assed artwork makes me wonder if Rivera does this strip on a cocktail napkin. I’m sorry, but I’m more interested in what happens to the monkey in the vintage strip than “what in the hells” going on with Rivera’s daily strip. My question is….how long will this last? I still think that really good cartoonists would take great exception to this facsimile of a classic strip. My 10 year old grand daughter could do a better job on artwork and story line. It really seems to get more pathetic each week! Just had to share my opinion again because I’ve been an avid reader of Mark Trail.
Ah, Mark. I DO share your pain. Really, I do! The problem for me is that I know she is capable of much more. All one has to do is look at her early Mark Trail strips: not just for the art, but the original compositions (layouts), the decision to have dual storylines, and supporting features, such as Mark’s conversations with various animals. Quirky, sure. But I think they worked and gave the strip a more lively and human point of view. Hell, even the somewhat distorted masthead (not Rivera’s fault) on this blog shows Rivera is capable of some really decent drawing.
Somewhere along the line, Rivera might have changed several of her views on the strip. A lot of that originality seems to have gone away, and, yes, the artwork has also suffered, or at least changed to a style that is not very appealing. I still think it is the pressure of deadlines and likely lack of supporting staff. And when Rivera does pull out something good and original, it gets buried by the rest of the stuff.
However, her constant belittling of Mark has also gotten very tiresome, even to me. At first, it was fine to see Mark brought down to human size, but it has gone on too long and gone too far. Frankly, I do blame KFS for some of this mess. They should have been providing more support for her from the start. I don’t mean hovering over her shoulder but giving her enough of a salary to bring on additional staff, for example. Hell, Jim Davis has a whole team of writers and artists to turn out the drivel that is Garfield!
As for the vintage Mark Trail, some of it is fine, but it gets clumsy and uninspiring. I’d take the artwork of “Rip Kirby” over that, any day. Now, that strip has really good penwork with a true understanding of line, shading, and composition. Anyway, thank you, Mark, for periodically checking in and helping to keep me honest!
Another Pokemon reference here. “A wild ________ appears!” is a standard thing that precedes random encounters in the game.
Good catch, Charlie! More confirmation on the kind of people Rivera is trying to attract. In a “so what!?” moment, the phrase also reminds me of the same, or similar, in-game responses in early text adventure computer games that I played as far back as the mid 1970s.