Home » Manitee Calamity! » Hey, man! Don’t have a sea cow! 

Hey, man! Don’t have a sea cow! 

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Well, okay! Mark gets another paying gig. He can pay off the plane tickets to D.C. and once again escape the confines of Lost Forest for a while, where he can rely on his usual seat-of-the-pants decision-making.  

Frankly, I don’t know why Mark keeps up the pretense of being a wildlife journalist when he is actually more of a fixer. That is, he’s a problem solver who gets dumped into a situation and told to fix it. This could be a great secondary covert role for Mark and expand the potential of the strip: Mark gets called in by the Dept of the Interior from time to time to resolve issues they cannot officially touch. Mark would not be allowed to even tell Cherry. 

Art Dept. It’s quite clear that Rivera does her best figurative work in closeups. We can quibble about the exaggerated expressions of Mark in panels 2 and 3, but ignoring the lack of shading or volume, they are well executed, especially panel 3.

Drawing a foreshortened head from below is tricky to do, especially if you want to keep the proportions intact.  On the right is a comparable drawing by James Allen from his infamous bat cave chase (April 2016).  Allen is a competent artist more in line with Dodd than Elrod. Mark’s upturned face is good, but its proportions do not track that close with the rectangular Mark Trail Head.

At the same time, Rivera’s drawing is simpler and the lines less expressive. This is most likely because Allen probably used a conventional ink pen and/or brush, whereas Rivera tends to use a graphic drawing tablet.

5 thoughts on “Hey, man! Don’t have a sea cow! ”

  1. Thanks (not) for the PTSD reminder of the tedious months in the bat cave. I will send Jules $100 if she can incorporate a story-ending wormhole into the Gulf of Mexico in a future story.

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    • Rivera did a Sunday panel on manatees back on January 6, 2021, preceded by a Saturday strip (January 5, 2021) with a flashback to the days when Happy looked like the traditional Mark Trail. He is talking to a young Marky explaining about the plight of the manatees.

      Otherwise, Downpuppy, you are mostly correct. It was told as a flashback story and did involve an SUV: I believe you are thinking about Mark’s handling of a pregnant walrus that gave birth in the back of an Escalade owned by Professor Leslie Joyce. This is in the story “Ferret, Black-Footed Ferret” and her account ran between 6/29/17 – 7/11/17. Hapy reading!

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  3. Ahh, thanks for the escaped walrus tale. The weird shapes of Leslie’s head as she told that tale were a good reminder of James Allen’s work without clip art or tracing.

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