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Addendum to May 27 2025: The B&W World of Mark Trail

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I posted this discussion separately, in order to focus on one visual aspect of Mark Trail: Jules Rivera’s increasing use of grays.

My regular post for 5/27/25 follows below. I’ve been noticing more and more the use of grays in the black & white newspaper version of Mark Trail. From a visual standpoint, this is a worthwhile improvement, as these mid-tones can help define volume, lighting, and even mood. Here is today’s strip as published in the usual “black & white” format of the newspaper. Compare it to the colorized version:

Do take into account that I’m photographing the strip with my phone, so there may be a certain loss of fidelity. Nevertheless, there shoujld be enough to clearly notice that Rivera is using grays to indicate basic contrasts between objects. In panel 1 a graduated gray pattern in the background helps establish the table lighting from the overall, darkened room. It is a mundane technique, of course, but given the stylized imagery that Rivera uses, adding mid-tones provides an improvement in the strip’s presentation.

Many strips today avoid shading, altogether, especially the majority of joke strips, where features such as tonality, volume, and mood may not be important.

However, even some continuity (dramatic) strips, where mood and lighting would seem more important, avoid tonality: Judge Parker is one example (click the images to see expanded versions):

On the other hand, For Better or For Worse will use overlapping blacks, whites, hatching and grayscale patterns to evoke a more sophisticated setting of light and mood:

The avoidance of “shading” is often justified because of the reduced size of the strips when published in newspapers and the fear that scenes and figures will blur together, giving a less inviting appearance to the readers. There is some merit to that position. Like grays, I think there is a middle ground that can be staked out, and we should be glad to see Mark Trail making inroads in this direction.

Is all this just BS? Pretentious academic-speak wasted on mere comic strips? Let me know.

The measure of greatness?

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Mark discovers that inventors, innovators, and charlatans do, indeed, hold fundraising events under different guises.

We humans are often easily fooled by tricks, trinkets, and glitz, meant to define greatness: a piece of parchment on the wall, a hulk throwing a designated bad guy out of the wrestling rink, or somebody waving a hat and declaring themselves to be great. Or maybe it’s the concept and promise of greatness, itself, a vague aspirational statement that could be taken in different ways, but never clearly explained.

The cartoonish notion of self-aggrandizement is on full display here, not that it is anything new. Kelly Welly, Cricket Bro’s designated sycophant, provides the usual cover for his phony status the same way we’ve seen in other places, both real or fictional. It is odd, given that Kelly is supposed to be a professional reporter. I suppose money talks big when it has to.

It’s one thing for Jules Rivera to let Kelly lord it over Mark once in a while, especially as she almost always came up short in the pre-Rivera incarnation of the strip. Yet it’s another thing to portray Kelly as some kind true believer, stifling any opposition to Cricket Bro with empty accolades.

Art Dept. If you have been looking closely, have you noticed strange distortions of scale between figures in the panels? Or even next to each other? For example, Kelly’s figure in panel 1 looks positively childlike in size compared to Mark. The mannequins in panel 3, between Mark and Cricket Bro, also seem out of proportion to the rest of the people in the scene.

Anybody want to hazard a guess who the old gent in panel 1 resembles? May not be the same person, but a brother or close cousin. The first fifty correct responders will be accorded the status of “Great in your own mind!”