The pre-Rivera Cherry never bothered Mark in the middle of his adventures, mostly because that version of Mark Trail remained rooted in the 1950s, before cell phones. Why would Cherry think the explosion had anything to do with Mark, anyway? For all she knew, he was on some lake fishing with Happy. I reckon if Mark had been checking in with Cherry all along, Rivera forgot to tell us.

Art Dept: I notice that Rivera likes to use heavy outlining on animals she draws. Why is that? Is it so kids can easily cut their tiny figures out of the newspaper and paste them on the refrigerator? Is it because it is the best method Rivera knows for making the animals stand out for easier viewing? Is it because she is illustrating various species of animals who happen to naturally have heavy outlines for their bodies? Or is it to smooth over the rough edges of a figure that has been digitally copied from another source, then manually cropped to fit the strip?

By the way, there is nothing necessarily wrong with using “clip art” in comics, unless it becomes too intrusive or repetitive. Long-time readers may remember this clip-art habit in earlier Mark Trail artists, where it was images of Mark that were often copied! As I’ve mentioned before, cartoonists have been using clip-art and tracing objects for many decades. Such images are usually fairly easy to distinguish, as they exhibit an unusual level of detail, precision, or style that does not always match the rest of the strip.