I’m surprised that Cherry did not bring up brother Dirk and his sounder of feral hogs, earlier. I’d have thought they would be one of her main reasons for turning down Bill Ellis’ job offer.
Maybe Jules Rivera doesn’t see all of this time spent on Mark’s complaining as story padding, but that’s how it comes off. I mean, two days should be enough, right? Perhaps the explanation for all of this lies in one way I think Rivera handles story development:
Each week is a “chapter”, with one main point that gets promoted, explained, and hashed out by Saturday. Then on to the next chapter the following week. Sure, there is a simplicity and clarity in that approach. And it supports the scant time people spend on reading comic strips, so it pays to simplify. If a reader misses a day or two, nothing much lost.
Nevertheless, there are parts of any story that do not deserve equal treatment. This is one of them. By Monday we should see Mark flying into a Texas airport, hopefully without the hokey western attire he wore the last time. I wonder if Diana Daggers will pick him up again!?
Using one of her standard bilateral layouts, Rivera starts off today’s strip by continuing yesterday’s hand wringing. I find it odd that Mark keeps repeating already-discussed points (“Texan women with guns”), to which Cherry keeps acting as if this is the first time she’s heard it. Mark’s comment in panel 3 doesn’t make sense. The women are out to kill wild pigs (hogs, or whatever). Sure. That Tess killed another animal, even an elephant, is supposed to make her a pariah? I think Cherry’s remark in panel 4 is correct. The other women—based on their avocation, not their location—would not see this as a detriment. In any event, there is no evidence that Tess killed Gemma, so why should Mark say that?
As for hitting on Texas—which happens to be the location of this trio of hog hunters—we could easily interpret today’s statements as Rivera injecting politically-charged comments, but we could just as easily see it as playing on common stereotypes about Texas. Both interpretations could be correct, but I’ll leave it to you to decide whether one takes precedence or if my interpretation is just wrong.
Then again, Mark and Cherry live in a small community in a forest, presumably somewhere in northern Georgia, based on the Old Trailverse Standard. In such a community, neither guns nor hunting would be strange. This would make Cherry’s comment disingenuous.
I wish Rivera would quit doing that! Yesterday, I made a perfectly fine observation about Tess being shown online in her former Tigress outfit, instead of her current hunting attire. And today, Tess is shown in both costumes. I just can’t win!
Well, are we going to suffer Mark’s whining about Tess Tigress the rest of the week, too? Sure, some of you are likely going to counter with “Well, we already have to suffer Rivera’s relentless regurgitation of pointless boat explosion jokes!” And I will have to re-respond with “… uh … well, yeah.” And back-and-forth this will go. Okay, I’m calling it all off, as of now. Thank you.
Panel 2 suggests Mark has a short memory about Tess. I recalled the story about Tess and her Tiger Touch Center from three years ago, as I’m sure most of you do. Here is a snippet from November 29, 2022. Apparently, Mark forgot this after-action phone call with Bill Ellis, who caught him up on Tess’s whereabouts.
I think three years in Real Life is probably only a year to a year and a half, tops, in the Trailverse. Still, there is always the hope that this might at least be a fun story.
I’m shocked, shocked to see Tess Tigress back in the country, apparently unburdened by legal technicalities. But as we’ve seen in this rebooted strip, nobody gets killed, hurt badly, or truly punished. Poor Mark! No matter what he chooses to do, he keeps running into the same gasbags, cons, double-dealers, crooks, and troublemakers. Maybe he just needs to get out more and meet a better class of criminals.
Okay, we knew where this was going. It is interesting to see that Tess’s former identity and costume was used in her online photo, rather than the recent group photo with hunting garb. Perhaps Rivera wants to ensure that her readers make the right connection. But what other connection could there be?
In other news, is Cherry turning into a real Suzie Homemaker? I wonder how long it will be before she starts sporting a pearl necklace.
Art Dept. Rivera does some decent staging today. The overriding principle here is the alternation between Mark and Cherry, as they take turns being the visual focus in each panel (cM-Cm-M-C). What also makes a bit interesting is the variety of layouts Rivera uses in the panels.
It is a happy day, indeed, to see Jules Rivera revisit the old Mark Trail trope of the ambiguously misplaced dialog balloon. Hah-Hah. Look at that bird (is it a European Robin!?) shouting “ARGH!” So funny. Okay, it might be a little cute. But fortunately, Rivera doesn’t do this very often. Moving on…
Today’s strip is a filler, certainly not moving the story along, even though we’re only in the prologue stage. But let’s give Cherry (or Rivera) her due for keeping a popular southernoath (panel 1) in the public domain, where some readers might assume Cherry’s statement is the result of having spent the prior evening binge-watching The Beverly Hillbillies.
But I’m still a bit disappointed that Rivera chose to not have Cherry participate in this assignment. It would have been a nice change from her usual Sunny Soleil Society stories. That is, Bill Ellis could have given both Mark and Cherry their own, separate assignments. Instead, Rivera kept it conventional. Looks like we’ll have Cherry once again cleaning Violet Cheshire’s boots and putting up with Honest Ernest.
I reckon Bill Ellis will never know how lucky he was that Cherry did not recommend her brother, Dirk, as a better replacement than Mark! He would certainly provide a special touch to that group.
We also see a more sinister-looking, less personable Ralph the Rat Snake (maybe?), who has nothing to say to Mark. And I’m not surprised, given how little time Mark has spent with him. Hissssss!
Okay, gang! After reading today’s strip, is there anybody here who has figured out the group’s leader? It sure isn’t Diana Daggers. The one illustration we saw of the group certainly does not lend itself to close identification of anybody in particular. As the group is based in Texas from a preexisting book club, we can safely rule out Kelly Welly, who doesn’t fit the look, anyway.
So who does that leave? Clearly, this isn’t anybody new.
Unless Rivera is looking back down the Trail Timeline to one of those earlier female opponents, I’m guessing this will turn out to be Tess Tigress. After all, her phony “Tiger Touch Center” was located in Texas. She also has a background in using rifles (or shotguns). And even though she had reportedly fled the country to avoid prosecution, there’s no reason she wouldn’t come back, even under a different name.
But, that’s just a guess. And my track record has been pretty poor, lately.
A “Woman’s Touch” was the theme of the week when Bill Ellis made his usual phone call during Mark and Cherry’s nature walk and love affirmation session. But it turned out that he wanted Cherry’s participation instead of Mark’s. This was a highly unusual idea, using Cherry as the lead in a Bill Ellis assignment. Ellis specifically wanted a female reporter to accompany a trio of female book club members in their mission to eliminate feral hogs from people’s yards.
Somehow, Cherry got the impression that she was expected to also take part in the actual hunting instead of simply reporting on the group’s activities, and Bill Ellis did nothing to dissuade her. Maybehe did infer that. I dunno. But Cherry is no hunter and even got a bit panicky at the thought of hunting feral hogs. So she turned him down. Instead, she suggested Mark would be the person to take on the job. Seeing as how Bill was interested in a woman’s point of view, I’m not sure what Cherry was thinking at that point, but Mark was on board. However, we have yet to hear what Bill Ellis has to say on this last-minute substitution.
Thus, within one week, Jules Rivera tempted us with the novelty of Cherry going on an official assignment instead of Mark, only to pull it away by having Cherry refuse the job. It could have been nice to see Cherry operate in a situation that did not include the Sunny Soleil Society. Still, as I noted, we have not heard the last from Bill Ellis, who may reshape the job to get Cherry on board. We’ll see. But until then, let’s see what aspect of Nature Mark is expounding on today:
Well, yippee yi yo ki yay! We’re back in Texas once again and once again talking about bats. You would not be chastised for thinking that Mark might even own some property out there. Or maybe a bat sanctuary.
Too bad that Rivera didn’t have to mention a particularly popular event down in Austin: “Texas is home to the largest urban bat colony in the world, consisting of [up to] 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats under the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas.”
Apparently, these bats collectively leave the dark underside of the bridge every evening from around mid-March to early November and create a spectacular cloud of flying mammals looking for their evening meal. It’s quite the attraction, online sources say.
Well, is this turning out to be a joke, after all (as I feared)? What could have been an interesting plot has turned on itself and appears to be going back to the Same Ol’ Same Ol’. But in spite of Cherry’s handoff and Mark’s self-assurance, Bill Ellis is running the show and wants a female’s point of view. I’m pretty certain that ability is not in Mark’s backpack. And this leads us back to Kelly Welly, unless Ellis comes up with a different solution.
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’sa 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.
To ask the question she did, Cherry must have strange ideas about what Mark does on assignments. And I don’t know why Ellis fumbled his response by implying she actually might have to shoot hogs. Heck, if Cherry was like that, we probably wouldn’t be seeing Honest Ernest around anymore.
Taking both statements together, I don’t get the point Rivera is trying to push here, other than Cherry doesn’t like hunting animals. And we already learned that. Maybe two more days for Q&A before Bill throws in the towel and moves on to Kelly Welly.
The Daily Trail 