Catching you up on the latest Mark Trail dailies! This past week we saw Cherry bring a fruit basket and a weak apology to Violet Cheshire at her home as a thin diversion to get on her good side long enough to strongly advise her to stop working with Honest Ernest and quit using his harmful lawn treatment. Unfortunately (or not), Violet thought that Cherry came over to harangue her about her secret affair with Honest Ernest. This was something that Cherry was not aware of and denied. But just then, good ol’ boy Ernest conveniently showed up and loudly proclaimed his love for Violet. Naturally, everybody was caught off guard. As I wrote earlier in the week, this knowledge could have been used (and could still be used) to leverage Violet and Ernest to ditch the lawn treatment in return for Cherry’s silence. The Saturday strip had Cherry weighing her ethical options. It’s a good crisis point for a switchover to Mark’s tiger/elephant story, though we’ve only had 1 week of Cherry to 3 weeks of Mark. Hardly seems fair!

Ah, a traditional Mark Trail Sunday strip, and well executed. I never heard of the Grasshopper Mouse, so this was especially informative. The Arizona Bark Scorpion mentioned here is a painful reminder of the time I got bit by a scorpion down in Tempe. It turned out to not be a serious issue, but I just got lucky for being careless. According to Wikipedia, thousands of people in Arizona get stung by the bark scorpion each year. Painful, but rarely fatal.

As usual, Rivera creates a customized title panel every Sunday. I’m thinking that the title is fashioned from stylized saguaro cacti. It’s remarkable how different the Sunday panels appear in contrast to many of the dailies.