So, it isn’t that Mark Trail gets the weird jobs while Kelly gets the meat-and-potatoes assignments. We get it, Kelly. The Men’s Club still wants to enforce the old rules. Perhaps that is why Cricket Bro and Kelly Welly arranged to have Mark sit in this singular, make-a-statement chair (or throne?) stuck in the middle of the room, to give him a false sense of importance as they start cutting him down. It’s a tag-team double whammy, as Cricket Bro dropkicks Mark on his masculinity while Kelly body slams his professional standing.
Kelly Welly has moved on from a mere journalist rival to nemesis status. I’m confused, though. Is nature journalism the ‘sad little industry’ Kelly references in panel 1 or the ‘environmental’ industry?
Panel 3 is interesting for its background, which loses most of its meaning in the black & white world of newspaper publishing. I don’t reckon it takes a lot of imagination to figure out the symbolism here, and my sense of decorum restricts me from having to state the obvious. It’s a rather bold statement , all the same.
Art Dept. This room reminds me more and more of the rooms in the German Expressionist movie, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Who knows!? Maybe Kelly is a better nature journalist, which is why Mark gets the weird and silly assignments. Of course, this sets up a real conundrum for Rivera. Can Kelly Welly be as good—or better—than Mark, in his own comic strip? Or is Bill Ellis a secretive, conniving SOB for sending both Mark and Kelly on the same assignment to see who submits the better story?
But maybe Kelly will once again be doomed by her delusions and lack of a brand name, bound for another humiliating return to the Mark TrailPhantom Zone. Of course, given the stakes here and the serious nature of the subject, we should not expect Rivera to turn this story into a farrago of nonsense and superficialities. Right?
Wait, sorry. I already predicted that that is going to be the case, though that is hardly a revelation.
Okay, go with the flow? Cricket Bro’s new persona reminds me of a couple of people: one person is the fictional character “Flash” (Lord Flasheart) in the BlackAdder series IV (“Blackadder goes forth”), a pompous, vain figure and womanizer. Cricket Bro’s pose in panel 1 could be right out of that sitcom. The second person is an infamous, equally self-centered, contemporary character, who is unfortunately not fictional. I can’t speak for Rivera on whether Cricket Bro’s current persona is based on either person, but I would not be surprised either way.
Regarding the story development, I’m feeling a bit optimistic here, based on the hypothesis that this story is going to be a real cross-eyed, absurd tale without the pretense of actual danger or suspense. The very room these people are in, for example, remains mysterious. What is it all about? There is that unusual chair; the mirror on the wall behind a pedestal holding a plant (?); and the way Kelly Welly silently stands, as if mirroring the pedestal and plant.
Okay, Rivera got me! I took her seriously that the “To be continued” message was meant to signal the change to Cherry’s ongoing life. Instead, we get another week of Mark. So, is that what the message box was for, to let us know Mark’s story was continuing now?
Anyway, when I saw panel 1, I immediately thought Rivera is riffing off of The Phantom. I mean, what’s with that big, white chair? And why is Mark sitting in it? Why are there no other chairs? What a bizarre scene, like some cheapo science fiction show.
Taking all this at face value, it is hardly surprising that Cricket Bro uses this opportunity to ham it up and indulge in the kind of schoolyard insults we normally associate with politicians. Well, one or two of them. But all of this is non sequitur blather. What does it have to do with the conference? Was that just a sham, too? Or is it that Cricket Bro is such a narcissist that he can’t resist rubbing it in. Actually, I’m wondering whether this is all charade and that Cricket Bro’s “hot bod” is really only fake prosthetics or the result of steroid injections. Or maybe, just maybe … this is some kind of AI prank. Maybe the image of Cricket Bro is a faked and jazzed up AI image. So why not? This is a comic strip, right?
Art Dept. Getting back to panel 1, we are left with a mystery: Why is Rivera showing us this large, sparsely furnished room, with the characters drawn in the background? Was it to fit in the message box and dialog balloons? I can’t believe it is for to showcase the room, as the drawing is rather slapdash.
After blithely and indifferently assisting with the capture of a raccoon in LaGuardia Airport, Mark took the air and toured parts of Manhattan before going on to his pre-convention meeting. Mark has a penchant for verbal self-reflection and saw fit to voice his impressions along the way, apparently talking to himself. And for some unknown reason, Rivera decided to alter Mark’s personality and portray him as a clichéd Gomer Pyle visits the big city. “Shazam!” Not sure what the purpose of that change was. Mark may be a lot of things, but he was never a country bumpkin. Snuffy Smith has that role locked up.
When Mark arrived at the location for his meeting, he ran into long-time (but rarely seen during Rivera’s tenure) rival, Kelly Welly. The last time they had any significant dialog was in Rivera’s first Mark Trail adventure. Welly’s resentment for Mark has grown over time, and she somehow found out about Cricket Bro and his convention, so she attached herself to his company. She is now Mark’s official contact for the AI convention. He’s just thrilled.
If you are thinking this whole affair is some kind of elaborate “James Bond” setup for Mark, I agree. Revenge is the most likely cause because of Mark’s interference in the manatee abduction attempt. But we’ll have to wait another week to learn more, as Rivera has signaled she is turning the space over to Cherry (or maybe, Doc Davis). Well, perhaps Cherry is getting tired of her never-ending problems with Violet and will strike out in a different direction this time.
Mark wants to honor rats!? Egad, has Mark been eating the cheese again? Well, Rivera already covered pigeons, so I suppose these rats (known by various nicknames) are the next popular animal life form people think about when it comes to New York City.
Talk about wanting to get rid of illegal immigrants, this would be a better place for all of us to focus. The idea of rats running around cities, homes, and apartments does not make for fond memories. They are crawling laboratories of pathogens. They have also long been thought to be the spreaders of bubonic plague during the Black Death in the Middle Ages. But more recent research says no, it is rat fleas. Those are parasites hitching rides on the rats.
So, do these city rats have a positive purpose? Not as far as humanity is concerned. There is a lot of truce to the old insult, “You dirty rat!” I’ll laugh at lions, alligators, and black mambas (from a distance). As for flies, tics, and rats, send them all to the Antarctic.
Yes, Kelly must have been in Mark’s shadow, since we have not seen her since early 2021. Well, we have another change today: A buffed outCricket Bro (aka Rob Bettencourt). I’m not sure where he got bulked up, but I’d bet it wasn’t just from eating lots of crickets.
For those curious, Rivera does use the “To be continued” box now and then, but not regularly. In most cases, Rivera simply switches over between Mark’s adventure and Cherry’s without notification. As a general rule, Rivera devotes two or three weeks to Mark before switching to Cherry’s story.
Plotwise, Kelly’s aligning with Bettencourt presents the appearance of confrontation and drama, but to what end? This is just a conference, right? What could go wrong?
Art Dept. While this strip has evolved/devolved into a cartoony simplicity, I’ll give credit to Rivera for Mark’s depiction in panel 1. His lookback pose is quite solid and believable. Mark’s expression is properly curious and suspicious. He has a solidity and plausibility that is normally found lacking. To compare, just take a look at Mark’s depictions in yesterday’s strip. Of course, that gravitas gets left behind when we move on to panel 3.
As the popular cliché goes, “there is a lot to unpack here.” But first, from a storyline POV, I like the idea of Kelly Welly coming in as a counterpoint to Mark. It is still not clear how this matchup is going to work. First of all, her backstory in Rivera’s reboot is that Kelly no longer works for the same magazine Mark does (or did). She freelances, has her own large online following, and now works for Cricket Bro. This certainly seems to fill a lot of checkboxes for being a “nemesis.” But I’m holding out for more info.
In this clip from 1/30/21, Kelly reluctantly gives Mark a compliment after deriding him for playing it safe and being a big shot. She holds a lot against Mark, but at the same time, shows some grudging respect for his position. So, the relationship was complicated then. How will it be handled now?
Art Dept. By the way, you might notice a strong difference in the art then, compared to Rivera’s art these days. Her earlier style had a “graphic novel” sensibility that gave the strip a grittier vision than even the pre-Rivera artists. And then there is what we see today. When Rivera brushed this early approach aside, so did she also cast off the best examples of real drama and mortality in the strip.
Still, Kelly Welly’s appearance at least presents us with the opportunity for seeing a more dynamic and uncertain situation develop for Mark. But what will actually happen? Every time I think it will, it didn’t. At the same time, don’t you think it is arrogant and hypocritical of Mark to cast suspicions on Kelly’s AI knowledge, after his own admissions of doubt and ignorance on the subject?
It’s not completely accurate to refer to Kelly Welly as Mark’s nemesis, at least in her original pre-Rivera incarnation. On the other hand, Cricket Brois an actual nemesis. Kelly Welly, as long-time readers know, was Mark’s journalistic rival in the pre-Rivera (or Classic) days, always trying to beat him out of an assignment or even mess up one of his assignments; but things usually didn’t work out for her. I suppose it is a matter of degree and motivation.
The last time Rivera featured Kelly—as far as I can recall—was in the first story she penned, where Mark had to investigate his Dad’s questionable business dealings (started October 13, 2020 “Woke Mark”). In that story, Mark felt the heat and wanted to give the assignment to Welly. Instead, she laid out her feelings about him and she did not hold back (this happens over several strips in late January 2021). In the end, she refused to take the story and told him to suck it up and do it himself. Kelly wasn’t about to be used as Mark’s “Get out of jail, free” card. The pre-Rivera Kelly would likely have taken the assignment. However, the current Kelly Welly Reboot is a cut from new cloth.
Yes, the New York subways certainly are famous, though not exactly in the manner Mark Trail is suggesting.
I’m not sure why Rivera started making Mark act like a country rube visiting the Big City. I think Rivera could have done the “personal tour” with a standard-issue Mark Trail broadcasting his commentary to whomever passed him by.
But this is not really a story at this point. It is more like a long TV commercial selling you on why you should visit New York City. Heck, maybe Rivera has a more personal motive in mind.
Art Dept. I don’t know how to explain this. In looking at the street dancers, they seem to have a real sense of mass and volume in their bodies, unlike the more cartoony, flat figures Rivera usually uses for Mark and the other regulars.
The New York pizza store pictured here is called “Pizza My ❤”, which is really a popular family-owned pizza empire in the San Francisco area. There do not appear to be any of their stores in Manhattan, or anywhere outside of San Francisco! Well, if Rivera gets free pizza for this plug, good on her. It’s always been a tried-and-true marketing ploy.
Alas, Rivera seems to relish making Mark seem like Goober from Mayberry: “And they even have indoor outhouses!” Let’s face it: the wide-eyed “Hick from Hicksville” expression that Mark is wearing wears on my ability to avoid pure snarking. And how does this self-indulgence add to the main plotline?
The Daily Trail 