My, my, my, that boat seems to have shrunk today! More surprisingly, this fishing boat now sports a new, second mast behind the cabin (panel 2). Still, panel 1 displays a nicely balanced composition.

Okay, we had a bucketful of comments yesterday, which I enjoyed very much, thank you. Clearly Monday’s strip caused some interest.

Commenter Mark opined that Monday’s strip was Rivera’s best drawing so far. High praise, indeed, but it implies a relativistic judgement. Comments from readers regularly disparage Rivera’s art when compared to the representational style of pre-Rivera Mark Trail. It also seems as if Rivera is moving (or has moved) Mark Trail from a serious adventure strip into some kind of joke-a-day comic with an undertone of absurdist-based continuity (sort of like Doonsbury, but minus the political and social satire). Today is no exception. Clearly, Rivera is aiming for a younger audience, not the long-time, older Trailheads.

Rivera’s irreverent approach would naturally be reflected both in storylines and drawing. We can certainly see masculinity-bashing and parodying of the strip’s historic social and aesthetic ideals taking place in her work. But for many current and former readers, whatever Rivera’s motives really are (including her interesting innovations), they may be entirely irrelevant:  People just don’t like or understand what they see. And that’s the problem.