Frankly, I don’t know. Maybe that trip will evolve into its own storyline before too long.
Anyway, if Cherry’s timeline coincides with Mark’s then it is at least the day after the movie and Bill Ellis’s phone call. Mark and Rusty could already be on their way to California. Cherry—working in her usual stretch pants-and-logo shirt uniform—hears a kitten hidden in some bushes. I don’t think a mewing kitten is an especially strange sound, though in the context presented, it would at least qualify as a surprising sound. Words matter.
Art Dept. Mark the Contrarian Commenter (as I think I must identify him here) would certainly criticize that gelatinous foliage in front of the house for having no realistic shape or identifiable trait, other than being “a bush” (or possibly a Monty Pythonesque blancmange). Its vagueness and anonymity stand in sharp contrast to the more representational grasses in the foreground. Though I do not recognize them, they appear to be identifiable. Why this visual disparity? Maybe Rivera doesn’t like to draw bushes the way artists don’t like drawing hands and feet.
By the way, are you mystified as I am by the very small two-pane window in panel 1?
Missed this week’s dailies? Boy, they were something! Why, there was fighting, shooting, car chases, abductions and rescues, and all manner of hair-raising cliffhangers! I mean, it was, uh, …uh, hold on. My mistake, I was reading Little Orphan Annie and got confused for a moment…Okay, I’m focused.
So what about the past week in Mark Trail? Well, not much happened, to be truthful. Rivera devoted the week to a “post-Bill Ellis phone call” conversation in which Cherry convinced Mark it was a good idea to take Rusty along with him as the “plus one” allowed by Ellis for Mark’s newest over-the-top adventure. You know the one I mean: The assignment is to find a movie director possibly hiding in a house that the director filled with lions and with actors for his current movie project. It’s a crazy enough concept that I think Rivera must have been rifling through Carl Hiaasen’s recycle bin. Say, do you think one of Mark’s stable of nitwit troublemakers will wind up involved in this story?
We’ll soon see, but don’t pass on today’s nature talk. It’s another story-locality subject.
Nothing says “Feisty Defense Lawyer” like a dude in a cheap suit sporting a five o’clock shadow. After reading up on this interesting issue, there certainly do seem to be various factions involved in this Catalina Island predicament. Still, I wonder why Mark is smiling (panel 6) while discussing another kick-the-can-down-the-road answer from the local government. “Kill our deer!? No way!” exclaim local citizens. It’s no surprise that cute Bambi-faced invasive deer attract more sympathy than actual (but less cute) native animals and flora that are being imperiled by these deer. Cute=Protect. I don’t see anybody protesting the eradication of zebra mussels or spotted lantern flies. Sure, “Stop the slaughter!”, residents chant. Okay, they can watch Bambi stand-ins die by the hundreds from starvation and disease once they have all but exterminated local resources. Hey, at least it’s natural.
So, Jules Rivera decided to have Mark ignore the presence and utility of the on-site animal wrangler in California, as well as pass up an opportunity to involve Mark’s friend, Rex Scorpius, a professional animal tamer. And for what reason? To bring Rusty along.
What to think of Cherry pushing Rusty on Mark? And what to think of her idea to let Rusty spend the day, alone, in a hotel pool while Mark works? What could possibly go wrong with that setup!? It’s not as if there would be dangerous predators in a hotel, right? Once again, we see the dark cloud of child neglect hovering. Well, and then there is the giant Room Service bill that is likely to show up on the expense sheet.
Art. Dept. And speaking of puzzling things, what is your take on that “lion” in panel 2? Has Rivera been watching The Wizard of Oz?
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.
Oh my. I wasn’t around in 1946, but what I saw of early Mark Trail (and summarized on Mark Trail Confidential) was that the bear in question was, in fact, Cherry’s “pet” bear that Mark mistook for an attacking bear. And they weren’t bonding too much at first, until Mark handed over a pile of cash he got from winning a nature photo contest.
Now, is Cherry seriously pushing to have Rusty tag along with Mark to search a house filled with lions!? That sounds like grounds for a child endangerment rap.
And how could Mark justify taking Rusty along as his partner/backup? Sure, he could suggest to Bill Ellis that Rusty would function as a staked goat to lure the lions out of the way, perhaps. That puts both Cherry and Mark in the pokey for child endangerment, and Rusty in the hospital. Or the ground.
I dunno. It all sounds so weird. Maybe Mark and Cherry want to break free from their restrictive lifestyle and start anew, on their own…and in another country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.
The silliness continues. I wonder why Rivera continues to highlight Rusty’s adolescent exuberance? Sure, it’s nice to see a father take the time to treat a son’s fantasy seriously, but how does that advance this story? It’s as if Rivera decided to exploit this distraction in order to pad the storyline for a second week. By the way, padding was a good excuse in the 1800s when authors were paid based on word count. That helped result in such wordy novels as “The Three Musketeers“, “The Count of Monte Cristo“, and “Oliver Twist.”
Although there are various types of animal wranglers, I wonder if those people really do use the word “wrangle” like Mark does (panel 3): “Honey, I’d love to go to Dollar Tree with you, but Brenda has some new goats and I need to wrangle them.”
It’s soooo damned hard to resist filling this page with the snarkiest comments known to humanity. At the same time, I keep trying to come up with reasonable arguments for why the comic syndicate allowed such a ridiculous story to make it to print. And I keep thinking that Rivera is having a good laugh while spending her time surfing (the waves, not the ‘Net).
Poor Rusty is thinking he’s gonna get more face time. By now, he should be used to the standard routine: 1) Get trotted out to kick start a story; 2) Mark gets involved, because he’s a “concerned” father; 3) Mark assumes control of the story and Rusty gets demoted to making cameos; 4) The adventure ends and Rusty disappears for the time being. At least Rusty gets more strip time than grandpa Davis!
At this point, it is futile to speculate much, though the sudden inclusion of a “partner” should indicate the logical person would be Rex Scorpius. Wait, I think I previously mentioned that, but let’s just say I’d be surprised if it wasn’t. Well, the surf must be up because the drawing is getting really sketchy again.
Really!? After more than a week, Rivera is still milking this phone call. Okay, this is a Monday strip, and it would traditionally summarize prior days. Perhaps this excuse might make sense these days for readers returning from places where the strip was not carried in the paper or where the Internet was not available.
Seems remote to me. In any event, the review time is over. Time to move on!
Former Daily Trail blogger and founder, Dennis Williams, sent me a link to an Australian artist (Adam Murphy) who creates mashups of different comics characters and styles, such as Charlie Brown and Calvin & Hobbes; The Phantom and Indiana Jones; and Tin Tin and Indiana Jones. Check out his impressive work on Instagram: @adammurphyart. Mark Trail does not seem to have been one of the inspirations.
The Tin Tin reference is especially significant, as the original Belgium strip proves that adventure comics with good suspense, drama, and even humor do not have to be depicted in what many consider a proper “realistic” style (e.g. Judge Parker, The Phantom, Flash Gordon, and vintage Mark Trail). Having noted this, I do not propose that Rivera’s current interpretation reaches the level of Tin Tin in either style or plotting. Well, I think it did in the beginning (as I have said before); and it could, again, if she wanted.
As for this past week, we have endured days of Bill Ellis on the phone with Mark, convincing him to take on an assignment to help locate a film director who disappeared inside a house, where the house apparently is locked down and filled with lions and actors involved in the director’s current film. Does this sound absurd? Of course it does, in pretty much every which way you can imagine! If you want more details, you’ll have to scan the previous posts; I won’t repeat them here. What I will say is that, unless this house is on scale with the Biltmore mansion in North Carolina, I don’t see how this works. But, we can meditate for now on today’s topic.
Once again, Rivera chooses a topic geographically related to Mark’s current story: California. And once again, Rivera ends the discussion with a non sequitur (“social climber”).
Art Dept. In the “penultimate” panel (that might sound snooty, but I like the word), Mark is posed in front of an orange oval. This juxtaposition has been a compositional device in Rivera’s work for over a year. In most cases, it works (see panel 1 in Saturday’s strip), because the oval carries across the entire panel, creating a proportionally divided background using a slowly curving line.
But today, we see an oval isolated within a larger panel, unable to reach its sides. Rather than dividing the background, today’s example serves to frame Mark’s figure, like the concentric circles in the opening credits of Warner Brothers cartoons; just not as developed. Was Rivera going after the same aesthetic concept or adapting the device to a different idea? Okay, only art/art history geeks would care one way or another, I suppose. At least I’m not using footnotes.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I try hard to give Rivera an even break, even promoting this strip whenever possible. I’ve invested a lot of time and thought into analyzing, describing, and commenting on various aspects of this strip; from writing, to visual composition, to drawing, to characterizations, and more.
So, when I tell you that this story makes less and less sense by the day, I’m not just trying out snarky comments for Comics Kingdom (in fact, I don’t post on the Mark Trail page. I leave that to Bill F. and his compatriots). For one thing, I’ve noticed a change in tempo and temperature coming from Bill Ellis through today. Starting with his initial near-hyperbolic presentation at the start of this phone call (last Saturday), it has softened to a casual, bantering phone play during this week, as if this was all just sending Mark out on a normal assignment reporting on Japanese Knotweed. No hurry, no big deal.
We have today’s strip closing out the week and filling the space on your screen or your newspaper page without furthering the story. Presumably, Jules Rivera is writing her own stories, so she can pace them as she pleases. But can she develop a plot that does not require wasting days with empty blather? We’ve seen this happen over and over. To be fair, Rivera is not unique. Prior artist James Allen did this, as well.
A traditional approach in adventure strips was to use Monday’s strip (if Sunday was not part of the continuity) to summarize the prior week’s progress. This helps relieve the cartoonist from having to keep inserting time-wasting strips into the storyline. But Rivera likes to do both.
Since Rivera claims to be science– and nature-oriented, she has ample room to make those concerns more integral to this strip. It would be much more appreciated by the readers (I’m sure) than wasting dailies with endless bad jokes, bad puns, and an apparent low regard for the readers.
Sometimes I just don’t get Bill Ellis. We have this totally off-the-wall assignment: Missing Director in a house full of lions. And never mind how much time has passed since animal wrangler Sammy Spotter reported the crisis. Wait, I’m not going over all of that again.
Well, wouldn’t Sammy Spotter be the exact person to take care of these lions? And once they were safely removed from the house, then there would be no danger searching the house for the missing Director. Am I right? Neither Bill Ellis nor anybody in California thought of this?
Now, if Mark is smart (just go with me on this), he’ll accept this goofy assignment, fly out to California, then use his fists o’ justice to knock some sense or courage into Sammy Spotter to get the lions out of the house. Then search the house. Fly home and wait for the direct deposit to go through. Does Bill want an article to go with that? That’s an additional payment. But we’re not finished.
Ellis finishes up today’s installment with an equally strange non sequitur (panel 4): Sammy lives near LA and cannot afford lions or houses. Did he misunderstand Mark’s question (panel 3)? Ellis’s response makes no sense, especially since he reported (yesterday) that it was the missing movie director that set up the house with the lions and locked-in actors.
Oh boy! Maybe we will see Mark team up with his good buddy, former animal wrangler/trainer, Rex Scorpius. Otherwise, I think we can all admit that the foundation and justification for this story is one of the most absurd story setups we’ve seen.
Personally, I don’t know what the problem here is. Nobody in their right mind would stay in a house filled with, presumably, free-roaming lions. I’d get the hell out of there, immediately. I’d also be questioning the sanity of any actors who remained. Get those scared cops to check nearby motels and brothels.
There is a plethora of flaws in this entire setup, and I’ve mentioned a few; but since that is the basis of this adventure, let’s just take it on its own terms: 1) How does Ellis know the director is still in the house? 2) Did the actors check for hidden doors and passages? The attic? The basement? Kitchen cabinets? Maybe Rivera, by chance, recently read Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story, The Norwood Builder. 3) Did anybody check to see if the director is hiding in plain sight, say in a lion costume, to see how the actors react to the situation? He could be resting with the felines, just lion on the floor. 4) Finally, how long has Bill Ellis been on Crack?
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