Time marches on a bit faster today, since Rusty is already at the “crash site” which took several hours of walking through Lost Forest to reach the first time…during the day! I give Rusty credit for recalling the correct path, not only since this is at night, but because Mark supposedly used his compass to help the kids navigate during their daytime search.

Still, just what does Rusty think he can find at night, without a flashlight? Yes, I know this wouldn’t be as dramatic and suspenseful in the daytime.

Whatever the case, we’ve obviously reached one of those dramatic highpoints where Rusty is surprised and unsure just who—or what—is staring at him from within the bushes. But it’s probably not a Klingon. I hope it’s not that flaky reporter—Jebediah—Mark ran into while on assignment to investigate bear assaults at that fake mountain retreat.

But scarier than having Jebediah pop out would be a Mime! Just look at those hands performing “The Wall.” Brrr!

Today is something of a recap of the Friday and Saturday strips. Fair enough, I suppose. It’s still funny that today’s action actually takes place between panels 3 and 4 of Saturday’s strip. Sharp-eyed readers (which should be most of you) will note that last Saturday, Mark was already heading to the doorway in the clothing we see Mark putting on today.

Do we see another unnecessary narration box in panel 1? It certainly is formal: “catch up with Rusty” would be better, right? I mean, we all know that Rusty is Mark’s son.

Instead of the narration box, Mark’s verbal statements in today’s panels better explain the situation. In addition, and perhaps totally irrelevant, we see another change of outside lighting, as Mark now casts a shadow, but from a full moon, not from some ambiguous source that Rusty experienced.

Nevertheless, this adventure progresses and that’s good.

Well, who could have seen this coming!? And what a non-surprise it is. Yet I have to admit that Mark’s expression in panel 3 is classic comedy. I wonder what that mysterious yellow light is outside of the front door where Rusty and Andy are exiting. Notice that Rusty and Andy even cast shadows on the floor. Could the front yard have motion lights? By the time Mark makes it to the front door in panel 4 the outside is dark as night, as one should expect. And he casts no shadow at all. Spooky, I tell ya!

Perhaps the special light in panels 1 and 2 is just artistic necessity so that Rusty and Andy can be seen against the night sky. Let me indulge myself a bit by imagining—based on Rusty’s belief in an alien crash—that it is a special light from an alien ship hovering over the cabin as it beams up our youthful investigator and his canine companion. Now, that would be one hell of an adventure!

(And I see that Downpuppy offered up a comment yesterday about Rusty’s penchant for getting kidnapped in the pre-Rivera stories!)

Art Dept: Interesting to see that Rivera shows Mark wearing full pajamas apparently made from the same cloth as his shirts. Maybe Mark purchases the material in bulk and has somebody in town making his shirts and PJs.

One might suppose that a pre-adolescent kid like Rusty would not have the moxie to take a hike in a forest in the middle of the night, searching for an alien or a supposedly lost camper. Well, it ain’t necessarily so. Many years ago my youngest son, who was 10 at the time, had the crazy idea to sneak out in the middle of the night and spend it at a friend’s place. He actually wound up sleeping in that friend’s family car, which was parked on the street!

Rusty clearly has a “go it alone” attitude like Mark. But is it enough? Well, Rusty is smart enough to take along Andy, a dog with a history of facing down bears. So I reckon Rusty has some smarts, after all. Now, will they be able to sneak away from the house without getting caught? Maybe we’ll find out Saturday.

I am surprised that Andy’s yawning is making me yawn! It’s midnight as I write this, so I think it is time to post this and then plod upstairs. I hope tomorrow will not be as gray and rainy as it has been for several days.

I’m trying very hard to avoid using the pun “Use the horse, Rusty. Use the horse!” Yet what we see here is more “science” or plain research than science fiction. Not that I have anything against science fiction. In fact, it’s one of my favorite literary genres. Anyway…

Just because this Tadd Crass character from 20 years ago now sells survival and camping equipment doesn’t mean he is connected to whatever is going on in Lost Forest. Does it? Glow sticks are not exactly an uncommon catalog item. And there is still little to show that somebody is actually lost, as opposed to somebody simply having camped there for a night and played around.

Nevertheless, I like the fact that Rivera is giving Rusty his due for once. You can see he’s trying to reason things out. But I hope the culprit doesn’t turn out to be one of Mark’s regular stable of crackpots looking for some kind of revenge.

So, fine. Analyst Rusty Trail interprets the swirling green light as a glow stick. Seems reasonable. But what about those three lights?  They are obviously too big to be stars. And their arrangement is too ordered. While Rusty ponders whether Pop’s tuition is correct, maybe he and Mark are both right:  Could be a lost extraterrestrial camper, filmed while signaling to his/her/its overhead ship. But I don’t think Rivera is prepared to take this strip that far into fantasy.

While fulfilling the tradition that Mark’s cabin is a crossing point for virtually every animal in the country, an apparent coywolf appears to be warning us to stay away. I’m not too anxious to cross his path.

It’s good to see that Rusty is not so easily swayed by Mark’s patronizing paternalism. He’s thinking through the situation, even if his premise is questionable. Considering the mask as a possible diversion, for example, is impressive thinking for a pre-teen. Or even a teenager.

How Rusty expects to find answers online is problematic. It’s not likely that actual Vulcans, for example, are going to put up a web site; and the Internet is filled with trolls, conspiracists, and just plain nutters. The main point here is that, from a plot standpoint, Rivera gives us a little more complexity in the storyline. So, there is the possibility that this story will not just quickly descend into another bagatelle of Mark coming across yet another goofball lately escaped from the asylum.

“Be careful what you wish for!” my mother used to tell me. And so, we watch the investigator at work. Looks like I’ll have to eat my wor…<gobble!><gobble!>

Mark seems somewhat over-reactive, like some holier-than-thou parent finding a book by Christopher Hitchens in their child’s bookcase. Perhaps that accounts for the “testifying preacher” pose in panel 4, because Mark does get preachy now and then. I noticed that most of Mark’s dialog has exclamation points (as in the strip’s good ol’ days). This is not something we normally see in Rivera’s interpretation.

If a person is lost in the woods after following Tad Crass’s bad advice, where does the horse head come into the picture? Was it part of the book’s advice to wear a horse head mask in the wilderness to save yourself from animal attacks?

Mark makes flexible use of the word “lost”. In panel 3, it is ambiguous whether Mark refers to getting lost in your mind from reading the bad advice or whether a person got physically lost in the real world after reading the book. In panel 4, a person may have metaphorically “lost their head” as a result of reading the book. That accounts for the contrived pose of holding up the horse head mask. Rivera almost got away with that visual pun. But not quite.

It is even more problematic, since “losing your head” refers to a person acting without reasoning or caution. Perhaps this lost camper is going to turn out to actually be Tad Crass, still living as if it was 20 years ago, yet trying to test out his AI-generated survivalist book.

Through a series of improbable connections (i.e. a horse head mask and some “pink crystals” found by chance at an abandoned campsite) Rusty Holmes … er, … Rusty Trail concludes they were left behind by a former TV star-turned-new-age-survivalist. Rusty may not have the right of it, but he knows how to uncover obscure information.

Still, Mark’s unfounded suspicion of a person in distress seems to be getting more unintended support from Rusty’s research. Will Mark go hunting the next day, only to find a lost, emaciated camper reduced to drinking his own urine because he couldn’t follow a path that Mark and the boys had clearly used?

Art Dept: While we suffer more puns, it’s been clear for some time that depictions of Mark and other people seen from a distance (e.g., panel 3) do not come across well, as if a digital image has been pixilated through reduction.

I would hope that even a youngster like Rusty would know that a mask left in the woods for about 20 years would not be in very good condition. Okay, so it must have been recently left. The pink crystals seem to tie in to Rusty’s Tadd Crass hypothesis, aided by Cherry’s good memory of commercials.

But I have to admit that I have not figured out how Mark connects all of this to the notion of an injured camper. Would the suspicious light then have been some kind of rescue signal? Or maybe some aliens actually did come down during the night (as they always seem to do), kidnapped the camping Tadd Crass (as they always seem to do), and are now probing him and dissecting him for evil reasons (as they also seem to want to do). The alien ship could also have made that curious incision around the campfire.

Or maybe it was just Doc Davis, apparently a fan of that old show, who put all this together to prank his own family for leaving him out of all of the get-togethers.

Rivera does at least try to create a sense of domesticity for Mark, something that we would see to an extent in pre-Rivera Mark Trail, as well. James Allen devoted at least three weeks of strips of Mark being at home and chatting with Cherry about online comics, reader comments, and his dangerous job, before jetting off to Katmandu to help look for the yeti (August-September 2019). With Rivera, Mark’s stays at home tend to be innocuous, self-conscious, and banal (like much of our own lives). Yet . . .

I don’t wish to flog a dead horse head, but do we take it literally that Rusty believes the mask he found is the actual 20-year-old mask from a TV show? I could not recall any “prank” show involving a horse-headed host that used to be on TV. But this sounds like a specific reference. Any ideas, people?

Finally, was Rusty’s alien invasion adventure designed solely to set up today’s pointless 3-panel “joke”? I sure hope not. As storylines go, this is pretty thin soup.

You’d think Mark and Rusty had been away for two weeks, the way they carry on. For goodness sakes, they only spent the day walking through Lost Forest! Now, they’re home. Calling it a “reunion” seems a might inflated. As for the ongoing status of Cherry’s dad, Doc Davis: Maybe he is still at his clinic, working on Sassy’s rash (since she isn’t around here, either).

But tomorrow we might see if Mark is too full of himself (as is usual) to ask Cherry how her day was! That would be a nice segue to combine the stories, since today’s submission doesn’t add much to what we already know.

Looks like everybody got safely home from their respective hunts. The bat in the foreground, on the other hand, is probably looking for that bat house Mark hammered together in Sunday’s installment.

Pushing past the standard panel 3 pun, where do we go from here? This could be the end of Rusty’s mini-adventure and a possible segue into an actual paying assignment for Mark. He has been between jobs for some time, but as a freelance reporter it’s to be expected. I wonder if he wrote up his fishing trip/train corruption adventure to sell to one of his regular magazines. This week could also be a good opportunity for Rivera to keep Cherry’s story fresh in our minds by having her tell Mark and Rusty what’s been going on.