Poor, deluded Marky. How can they get out THE TRUTH when they are wanted by THE LAW? The obvious response is “By acting responsibly and professionally in the first place, Mr. Trail.” If they hadn’t been acting like street protesters yelling down a speaker, then taking on local police, they might now have some standing.

The other, perhaps larger, question is why Rivera chooses to push Mark into this role of a reactive, sometimes-out-of-control figure, ignoring normal journalistic standards (and the law), and then acting shocked to find out authorities take that kind of behavior seriously.  It’s one thing to show Mark out of his depth, even clueless from time to time (which seems to be a lot of the time). Is Rivera leaning towards turning Mark into a modern-day Edward Abbey persona, or perhaps one of his Monkey Wrench Gang members? In any event, Rivera can’t have Mark (and Happy) breaking the law left and right, then pretend nobody cares.

I’m just riffing here, of course. It would be a most dramatic reboot of her reboot to go down the Abbey Path. It could get pretty exciting, in fact. Frankly, I don’t see that happening, in part, because newspaper comic strips are still largely bound by socially conservative family values from the days of Ozzie and Harriet. What do you think? Should Rivera turn Mark Trail into a Dark Knight of activist journalism?