Well, as I suspected, Bill did turn to one of his other magazines and went with Teen Girl Sparkle. Of course, Mark should not be surprised (panel 4), given his publishing history with that magazine. So, why does Rivera go the route of causing Mark (never mind Happy) to look gobsmacked? Maybe it was to continue her joke (ha-ha) about Mark Trail—the macho wildlife writer and fisticuffs aficionado—publishing articles in a magazine dedicated to adolescent and teenage girls (like the old 16 magazine).

I suppose that we could also be puzzled by Mark and Happy’s seat swapping that happened between panel 1 and panel 4. Or maybe it was an unconscious transfer of position by Rivera that happened between panel 3 and panel 4, instead. Having drawn Mark and Happy from the point of view of the monitor, Rivera could have absently maintained the left-right seating when she composed panel 4. Some conspiracists might argue that there was a time warp caused by an occurrence of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum that allowed Mark and Happy to go get refills on their coffee and sit down in each other’s seats, all at once.

We’ve all been there, right? I say that in jest but consider those Tik-Tok (Bik-Bok in the Trailverse) vids where the videos are published “backwards”, in mirror image of the originals (e.g. all text is backwards). Is that relevant? Maybe, maybe not; but it’s what popped into my head while searching for something actually useful to say. And it just takes too much effort to come up with anything more clever at this point.