We first met Chet Chedderson as an unscrupulous shipping magnate in the Zeeba Mussels story ( 8/12/21-2/4/22), as he tried to prevent Mark from investigating and reporting on the occurrence of invasive zebra mussels arriving in American waters on the hulls of his tankers. Chedderson even went as far as hiring thugs to beat up Mark. Mark doesn’t seem to hold much of a grudge. So Chet became this strip’s symbol of corporate greed and environmental indifference. After a brief, unmemorable cameo in another adventure, he is here again, taking on the role of a rich dude building a golf resort without regard for the local environment. His son is merely a projection of his father. But this is all quite in keeping with traditional Mark Trail bad guys, insofar as their personalities are superficial and stereotypical. Golfing aside, it’s the kind of story that might have come from Allen, Elrod, or even Dodd.

A common complaint about Rivera’s stories is their weak plotting and absurdities. That can hardly be denied when seen in toto. I mean, lions in a house (e.g. snakes on a plane)!? It might be less so, here. For the most part, the story has followed a logical and coherent path: Mark discovers pollution from an unknown source in a favorite lake; a follow-up interview with the local forestry ranger proves uninformative; Mark learns about a new golf course and begins to think of runoff pollution; he “coincidentally” gets invited to spend time at the golf course; and discovers that Chet Chedderson is the developer. Of course, there are silly bits meant to keep the flow going and expand the storyline, such as the resort’s water park that Rusty explores, and Happy Trail being the person who invited Mark (and family) to the golf resort because he just happens to be a member of the new club. Overall, it’s a better than average storyline for Markey. But will it hold up?

We spent this week watching Mark and Happy deal with an alligator crossing the fairway while Chet and Brett whined and complained. Mark berated them about interfering with local nature habitats by building the golf course too close to the gator’s home. Then Mark helped the reptile get to its watery destination. This gator scenario will surely further convince Mark of the Cheddersons’ complicity in the lake pollution and embolden him to take more dramatic action. Or so I hope.

Alligators. Hardly a surprising subject, but as often as Rivera can, she relates the current subject to the current story or story location. The alligator literature says that gators do not normally attack humans unless provoked or reacting from a defensive posture. I’d still keep my distance. They are quite different from crocodiles, which will actively attack humans without provocation, often killing and consuming them. The Nile Crocodile (even feared in ancient Egypt) and the Freshwater Crocodile (S.E. Asia and Australia) have the highest annual body counts (in the hundreds). I never much thought about crocodiles when I was a young lad visiting Egypt and happily relaxed in low-hulled boat ferries crossing the Nile. But now? They scare the bejeebers out of me just thinking about them. You can look up “Crocodile Attack” in Wikipedia for more unsavory details.