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The Week in Review and the Sunday Nature Chat

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Action? Drama? Suspense? Got me. As usual, we haven’t seen any. It’s been a quiet week in Lost Forest (to riff on Garrison Keillor): Mark is home, the hot water is running, and everybody wants to go swimming at the lake. The only problem is that it’s fenced off because of water contamination.

Bad luck for the swimmers, but better luck for Mark (and maybe we readers), because it looks like another home-grown (i.e. non-paying) investigation is in order, as Mark returns to his roots to deal with a local environmental problem. The question, though, is Why?

Why, indeed? The fact that there is a fence and a sign means the authorities know about. What’s Mark going to do? He’s a reporter, not a bacteriologist. In the real world, he’d make a couple of phone calls, write up his findings, and that would be that. Perhaps if there was an actual newspaper in the area, Mark would publish there. But this is Mark’s World. Clearly, there will be something nefarious afoot.

No awards (again) from the Norman Rockwell School of Illustration this week. And we must bide our time until Monday, with today’s nature lesson. Get your notebooks out!

The following Sunday falls on July 6th, so Rivera got her “July 4th”strip out today. We have a fairly orderly, if sometimes corny, set of panels. The customized title panel reminds me of one of those late-night infomercials where you can buy the “Collector’s Edition American Bald Eagle” statue for only two easy payments of $39.99, plus s/h.

The eagle drawings are, indeed, well done. As I’ve mentioned several times before, Rivera uses stock images, such as this photo. Close comparison shows that she free-handed much of it, rather than just performing simple copy-and-pastes. Speaking of using visual rfeferences, when John James Audobon made his detailed bird drawings, he had to shoot the birds in order to have the time and opportunity to pose and draw them. This was a common practice back then.

(click photo to see enlarged image)

The main complaint I have—and one that you’ve seen me make before—is Rivera’s insistence on sticking Mark in as many Sunday panels as possible and over-indulging in poor jokes and puns. Not sure why she thinks this is good, nor who she is aiming this at. It surely isn’t younger people. Maybe it’s directed at the kind of people who buy American Bald Eagle statues for two easy payments.

Hooray for contamination! Maybe we’ll get a story out of this?

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Yes, Rivera’s art can certainly be atrocious, as recent critic Rich grunkle duck likes to point out. But more often, it is inconsistent, not always sunk to the bottom of the comic strip swamp, though today’s strip is a good candidate for that distinction. If this, and other recent strips were all we had to go on, it would be difficult to disabuse the accusation of non-stop slop.

As for this storyline, my fear is that, once again, Rivera will give lip service to the topic, itself. Like the just completed AI and the Environment story, very little time was actually spent on the topic and we didn’t really learn much more than a few platitudes. As this is a strip with a focus on the environment, one might expect a bit more depth.

But was it any different in pre-Rivera stories? Mark’s infamous bat-cave adventure had virtually nothing to do with bats or wildlife problems. Doc’s buried gold adventure took place in the desert. The bank heist and fake kidnapping story also partly took place in a cave with a silly sideshow of calming a bear with candy bars. The premise of Mark going to visit a friend to see gray wolves was soon forgotten.

None of these stories were really what we would call “nature-oriented”, as opposed to just being adventure stories. But, however far-fetched and contrived they were, they were still presented seriously, providing elements of plausible danger and suspense, with a feeling that somebody could get hurt (reference the Yeti, Oh My Yeti story, where the leader actually did die!). But ignore these elements and the stories, themselves, become thin and mediocre. That is: take out all of the “Indiana Jones” traps and pitfalls in the Bat-Cave story, and all you have left is a story of three people, trapped in a cave by human traffickers, making their way through a cave system, finally locating an exit and winding up swimming in the Gulf of Mexico.

Those elements of danger and suspense taken seriously are almost always missing in Rivera’s stories. Their absence helps lays bare the dead-ends, lapses, and plot holes in her stories. Why she leaves them out is not clear. It’s not from lack of awareness. Again, her first story certainly did exhibit real elements of suspense and danger, along with strong emotions. But that is nothing like what have been getting.