Wondering how Mark knew the elephant’s name (“Gemma”)? Me, too! I found it mentioned back in the July 19^th strip when Bill Ellis was trying to sell the assignment to Mark.  Ellis never said exactly where the elephant was, except that it was in the South. Rampaging Gemma could have trotted over from Arkansas, as far as we know, except that Bill also stated there were sightings across four (unnamed) states. In the end, who knows and who cares. Emma is In the House!

Nice tiger drawings, by the way. Sure, Rivera might be borrowing from web sources, but cartoonists have collected and used “swipe files” as reference material for at least 100 years. You didn’t really think the prior Mark Trail artists drew their animals from memory, did you?

Anyway, it seems Tony the Tiger got pretty docile once Gemma showed up. I think Rex should win the test by default, don’t you? He didn’t try to run away, and wasn’t that the point of the test?