This was mostly a week of exclamations, excuses, and e-waste. We returned to Rusty’s e-waste revenge adventure where he led Mark to the not-so-secret location in Lost Forest where he and Robbie buried the broken controllers. That Rusty, himself, was also a participant in burying the game controllers that he wanted to use as a way of getting back at Robbie was certainly a surprise!  The irony escaped Mark and Rusty, but not this Trailblazer.

Upon arriving at the location, Rusty and Mark discovered the area was full of discarded monitors, controllers, chairs, and other knickknacks that Jules Rivera casually pasted on top of the grass. I reckon this secret location became well known to people who like to dump electronics in the woods. That’s really not so unusual:  As a kid, I came across stoves, refrigerators, and mattresses dumped in the woods where I lived.

Although many references were made to things “buried,” everything was lying on the surface and no digging seems to have taken place. Maybe Rusty and Mark were too distracted by the debris. A pissed-off Mark figured it was time to have a talk with Robbie’s father. In another surprise (Gosh, two surprises in one week is a record!), Robbie’s dad turns out to be Ranger Shaw, one of the three hapless participants in Mark’s fishing survival camp episode. Small world, huh?

Art Dept. Nobody commented on the giant spider in Wednesday’s strip. I thought one of you might notice its unrealistic size. Well, considering the tree its web is attached to, it sure looked big to me! Also, Rivera drew a chipmunk on Saturday that didn’t look like a statue or cardboard cutout. Well done, in fact. Will we say the same thing for today’s nature talk?

What a coincidence! Rusty tells Mark about his e-waste project for the school science fair, and all of a sudden, Mark has his own show-and-tell about e-waste. I like today’s title panel, though I’d have wanted to see the “Mark Trail” logo appear like actual text on circuit boards. Perhaps, Rivera thought it would be too small? Well, everybody knows the name of this strip, right?

I’m puzzled why Rivera cites statistics from 2019. Perhaps she could have compared that number to a more recent statistic: The UN reported some 68 million tons of global e-waste for 2022, alone. Another issue is that electronic waste contains billions of dollars’ worth of rare earth resources, such as gold, silver, copper, and iron. Yet our country has no national standards, policies, or programs for safe reclamation and disposal. Seems that “recycle” and “reclaim” never made it into the manufacturers’ thinking.