Well, that was good fun, reading your votes and comments. I’m glad to see the additional proposals, as well.  But so far, it appears that Rivera is milking this travesty of a confrontation for all that it’s worth.

“And puts his other two feet on the ground!” – how many feet does Mark have? Is he a secret centaur?!

It must be more than two, as Rivera has Mark Trail step on his third foot <ahem!> to ruin another important interview early on. He always seems like an over-excited idealist (or 12-year old), even to the point of breaking the law and fighting with (or fleeing from) law enforcement. Why? Sure, Mark has always had recourse to fistfights in the past, but usually directed against crooks, poachers, and other bad guys. With Rivera, Mark’s environmental activism is hands-on. Is Rivera trying to turn Mark Trail into one of Edward Abby’s Monkey Wrench Gang? That could partially explain Rivera’s treatment of the character and stories. But it is sometimes difficult to see the underlying serious intent, as the overt parody and absurdities overshadow it.

Art Dept. It’s as if Rivera is not even trying, though I think that is incorrect. Still, the art can look haphazard, even deliberately distorted. Those guards in panel 1 apparently grew two extra feet (or Mark shrank). One guard seemed to be levitating in Wednesday’s episode. Further, Mark merely has to wave his hands in panel 3 and two guards go flying, as if Mark was a Wing Chung master like Ip Man, the trainer of Bruce Lee. Are we experiencing Mark’s own idealized view of reality? That could even help explain the weird characters and the often distorted and flattened figures. Unfortunately, there is no context to support that hypothesis.

But let’s don’t be partisan about this. Some of you may recall that there was lots of dislike and snarky comments directed towards James Allen during his tenure, not only for his frequent copy-and-paste artwork, but also for drawn-out and meandering stories (e.g. the bat cave story and the bank robbers/kidnapping/cave travel story) and post-adventure patronizing dialog between family members.