Something is tragically—or stupidly—mixed up. As I stated yesterday, reporters are observers and recorders, as we all know. So why is Jules Rivera putting out this obviously preposterous proposition of Cherry having to hunt feral hogs as part of the assignment? Is Rivera setting us up for some kind of a joke at the end of the week? Is Bill going to clarify: “I was just kidding, Cherry! Of course you don’t have to hunt feral hogs. You just have to tag along with three women who do!”

I know some of you are going to think about that final narration box. No, not the fact that it is again present, but its contents: “Yep. That’s canon.” It seems to be a loose application of the term “canon”, which normally refers to an accepted, recognized body of work in literature or music. There are also different applications of the term that refer to laws and rules that do not apply here.

This different, personal use of the term seems to be popular on social media, where a speaker feels something is a “significant event”, “official”, or just true. As cultural outsiders, the rest of us would have probably just written, “Yep. That’s a fact.”

Art Dept. Try to ignore (or block out) Cherry and Mark in panel 1. Those are some wickedly stylized trees and landscape in panel 1. They could belong to a completely different comic strip. In fact, I think they are better than the flora Rivera has been drawing recently. Now, I’m not saying they are more realistic or representational, not in the least. Rather, their surreal appearance suggest a wholly different vision. If Rivera were to apply that aesthetic consistently to the strip, we could see a remarkably different version of Mark Trail.