… but nothing happened on the way over, so it’s all okay. Let’s thank Jules Rivera for clarifying that Mark is driving a rental car, rather than one he owns … or stole. He also didn’t rent a horse, so that’s something! Since Mark didn’t spend the entire week at the bridge, the story moves on.

“That’s like three cabins strapped together!” Mark gulped in his Gomer Pyle response. Seem to be more like four or five cabins by area, depending on what your idea of a hunting cabin is. But it’s Texas, and as many citizens like to brag, almost everything is big in Texas.  A quick scan of actual hunting lodges indicates this is not even in the top five for size. Oh, Mark. You really need to get out more often!

This is probably a commercial establishment, set up to handle several groups of hunters at a time.  In my state, which features lots of lakes, some people have built summer “cabins” on rural lakes that are bigger and more modern than many houses here in town, complete with grass lawns and cement driveways. I reckon “cabin” is a flexible term.

Art Dept. A defender might point out that the extreme miniaturization of this strip in newspapers is a big reason for Rivera’s very simplistic drawing style, which often borders on the being sketchy. To a certain extent, I agree. But the style of other strips belies that size justification as a primary reason. As I’ve noted in the past, Rivera does sometimes use more dynamic layouts in her panels, as we see in panel 1 and even more in panel 3, with its bird’s eye angle and axonometric view of the cabin. Yet much of the detail in panel 3 is sketchy, except for the cabin, which was drawn with more care. And that static-looking car in panel 1 would look more like it is moving had Rivera added a few “speed lines” behind it.