Egads! The entirety of this week has been wasted on a pointless back-and-forth chatter over whether slack-jawed Mark Trail should take Rusty on an official assignment, an assignment involving close proximity to dangerous animals. Maybe Cherry has been sniffing the compost too long.

And by the way, just who is Cherry responding to and winking at in panel 4? Us poor readers? That kind of panel where the character reaches out to the reader with a wisecrack or slogan is more normally used in the concluding panel of a story. It seems artlessly and confusingly shoved into today’s strip, as if this was a punchline to a joke, like actors breaking character.

Art Dept. Occasional commenter Mark (no relation) pointed out yesterday about insufficiencies in Rivera’s artwork, such as foliage lacking shape, details, and accuracy. And looking at the background today and the past several days, it is easy to agree.

Partially in Rivera’s defense, I will point out that backgrounds in art tend to be simplified as a general rule to help focus viewers on the foreground figures. It is not a hard-and-fast rule, but merely a convention that’s been around for some 700 years.

Rivera will take this tradition to extremes. The background foliage in today’s panels are shapeless and lack definition; sometimes not even suggesting “trees” as a possibility; for example, panel 1. And check out the trees in panel 2 of yesterday’s strip, which look more like the hokey newspaper Christmas trees I was taught to make in Elementary School.

It should be obvious, however, that photographic representation is definitely not the design goal that Rivera has been pushing in the strip. And that has been a central problem for many Mark Trail readers.