There goes Rivera once again, wringing out yet another sappy 3-panel gag strip, featuring the “mom packs for a six week vacation” trope. Real comedy gold. If the hokey poses of Mark and Rusty in panel 2 aren’t contrived enough, in panel 3 Rivera has them standing in the doorway, looking gobsmacked (“Uh-oh, there goes Mom again!”). Yet more sitcom tropes worthy of Nickelodeon. But this just does not fit Cherry’s personality. I’m wondering if Rivera is making these choices on her own or if she’s getting advised from people at King Features on ways to make a strip about nature and the environment appear cute and appeal to more readers (maybe like the kind of people who enjoy Hi and Lois and Garfield).
Art Dept. One day Rivera will figure out bears. As we’ve seen in the past, she’s used different approaches, or perhaps, different online sources. Now, using reference images is not a negative in comic strips. In fact, cartoonists have been using visual references for over 100 years. It’s a lot easier now since cartoonists don’t have to maintain filing cabinets full of photos and drawings.
I’m pretty sure that Rivera used this online image as her source. Note that she even used several of the same river rocks in her own representation.
Perhaps she manually traced it (as artists would have done in the past) and then improvised the texture and lighting. Or, she ran the image through several transformations with her software. Whatever, I think she went too far, creating a bear with a strange surface texture. Sometimes you just shouldn’t fool with Mother Nature.
The Daily Trail 
At least Hi and Lois and Garfield aren’t incoherent messes every day on both the writing and art front. Rivera also got her feature cancelled from half the papers it was in. At some point you have call a spade a spade.
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Thanks for the response, Rich! Oh, we’ve planted plenty of spades in the Trailverse dirt over the years. But as I’ve said before, we aim to dig deeper and wider than simply subsist on superficial turf slicing.
Regarding the writing of Hi & Lois and Garfield, there isn’t much to say, especially with Garfield. The Garfield ghost artist/writing team might just as well simply repeat the same image of Garfield eating pizza every day and not bother with their five-word attempts at humor. Garfield is a highly-polished, corporate-approved meme strip for people who collect cat objects to litter their houses with. Pearls Before Swine, on the other hand, is a great strip for humor, satire, and occasional parody. It’s also simple drawing, but without the slick superficiality of Garfield.
Hi and Lois is MOR, forgetable, bland drawing and doesn’t even pretend to be funny. It’s part of the Beetle Bailey family of outdated, should-be-retired strips. It’s a humdrum mishmash of Blondie and Family Circus. Zits is a far funnier “family” strip, with a great drawing style reminiscent of Jack Davis.
But if all I had to choose from was Mark Trail, Garfied, or Hi and Lois, I’ll take Rivera’s chaos, inconsistency, and inconsistency. Yes, the writing is amateurish a lot of the time, the artwork is inconsistent, but Rivera has good ideas and has been quite inventive in her interpretation of the Trailverse, firmly taking it out of the 1950s. And it’s a continuity strip, quite rare these days. You might spend time going through the first Rivera Mark Trail story, which began on October 13, 2020. The comparison with today is amazing.
One of the things that does drive me crazy is Rivera’s moving away from that “graphic novel” approach she often used back then, before sliding into the simplistic style she favors today. I think her writing has moved in the same direction. Rivera would do better to foresake the bland attempts at humor and concentrate more on building better storylines.
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Your analysis grates because of how superficial and cloying it is in service of giving a raging hack the benefit of the doubt for the sake of your blog. But I guess that’s par for course for the “your content is now MY content” types that don’t understand the average comic consumer isn’t looking to be irritated for “the fun of it”. She isn’t capable of making a well crafted comic because she doesn’t care and, in her own words, thinks all of this is a” vibe”. You’re trying to canonize other comics as lacking in comparison but I will take endless lasagna tags over Rivera’s uncomfortable “A tractor is a lawnmower” nonsense any day.
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Oh, that’s fine. I understand. I don’t particularly feel a “need” to support Rivera, except where I find it deserving. I set specific goals for myself when I took over this blog, for when would end it. I’m just not there, yet.
I do this blog mostly for fun and a challenge, without taking it too seriously.
As I’ve pointed out here and elsewhere, Rivera’s original take and approach was fresh, inventive, yet still more naturalistic than it is now. I took over this blog, initially, out of respect and curiosity for what Rivera was originally trying to do. Then it became a matter of trying to figure out where she was going and what her motivations were as things changed.
I’m not sure what “your content is now my content” comment means. I do try to be more or less neutral. I don’t make excuses for the strip, nor do I dismiss everything out of hand.
There aren’t many “continuity strips” left, in part because the reduced printing size limits the drawing. And the reduction also limits the amount of dialog. Based on what’s available today, readers seem to prefer the quick “read-and-move-on” format of most strips. I doubt that Pogo could exist today in its style and format.
I agree with you that the average comic strip reader is probably not looking to be annoyed or irritated with comic strips. They want their chuckle, but more, they want the continuity of familiarity. That’s why Blondie, Hi and Lois, Garfield, Family Circus, and Peanuts reruns persist. Nevertheless, there are plenty of strips that are irritating or annoying, even the well-drawn ones.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
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