Yes, Kelly must have been in Mark’s shadow, since we have not seen her since early 2021. Well, we have another change today:  A buffed out Cricket Bro (aka Rob Bettencourt). I’m not sure where he got bulked up, but I’d bet it wasn’t just from eating lots of crickets.

For those curious, Rivera does use the “To be continued” box now and then, but not regularly. In most cases, Rivera simply switches over between Mark’s adventure and Cherry’s without notification. As a general rule, Rivera devotes two or three weeks to Mark before switching to Cherry’s story.

Plotwise, Kelly’s aligning with Bettencourt presents the appearance of confrontation and drama, but to what end? This is just a conference, right? What could go wrong?

Art Dept. While this strip has evolved/devolved into a cartoony simplicity, I’ll give credit to Rivera for Mark’s depiction in panel 1. His lookback pose is quite solid and believable. Mark’s expression is properly curious and suspicious. He has a solidity and plausibility that is normally found lacking. To compare, just take a look at Mark’s depictions in yesterday’s strip. Of course, that gravitas gets left behind when we move on to panel 3.

As the popular cliché goes, “there is a lot to unpack here.” But first, from a storyline POV, I like the idea of Kelly Welly coming in as a counterpoint to Mark. It is still not clear how this matchup is going to work. First of all, her backstory in Rivera’s reboot is that Kelly no longer works for the same magazine Mark does (or did). She freelances, has her own large online following, and now works for Cricket Bro. This certainly seems to fill a lot of checkboxes for being a “nemesis.” But I’m holding out for more info.

In this clip from 1/30/21, Kelly reluctantly gives Mark a compliment after deriding him for playing it safe and being a big shot. She holds a lot against Mark, but at the same time, shows some grudging respect for his position. So, the relationship was complicated then. How will it be handled now?

Art Dept. By the way, you might notice a strong difference in the art then, compared to Rivera’s art these days.  Her earlier style had a “graphic novel” sensibility that gave the strip a grittier vision than even the pre-Rivera artists. And then there is what we see today. When Rivera brushed this early approach aside, so did she also cast off the best examples of real drama and mortality in the strip.

Still, Kelly Welly’s appearance at least presents us with the opportunity for seeing a more dynamic and uncertain situation develop for Mark.  But what will actually happen? Every time I think it will, it didn’t. At the same time, don’t you think it is arrogant and hypocritical of Mark to cast suspicions on Kelly’s AI knowledge, after his own admissions of doubt and ignorance on the subject?

No, wait. Really! I’m sure there’s a perfectly valid reason that somebody in a blue uniform (a cop?) in Manhattan would suddenly yell out to the crowd for a “nature expert.” It must have happened at one time or another, right? Well, here is one possible scenario:

Perhaps a fellow traveler spotted a wounded monarch butterfly on the pavement and prepared to step on it, but a policeman intervened and stopped the stomp. Wanting to be sure of his actions, the cop calls for a nature expert to advise whether the butterfly is a Federally Protected Species. 

So, we have an out-of-town country woodsman in the Big Apple rendering assistance to unenlightened city folk. Maybe Mark could get a movie deal or TV series out of this!

Well, Mark, you might feel more comfortable if you were not dressed like a lumberjack. Perhaps normal “city clothes” would help you fit in. 

In your pre-Rivera days, Mark, you used to wear a jacket and tie when the situation warranted. Now, you always look like a walking advertisement for L.L. Bean. 

I suppose we should take Rivera’s occasional hints more seriously and consider that these stories are from the early days of Mark’s journalistic career, before he became a seasoned world traveler and world-famous nature reporter. That might also account for a lot of the poor humor.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Rivera is parodying the saccharin “bon voyages” that Mark and Cherry exhibited in the pre-Rivera era, such as in this James Allen contribution:

But I’m not here today to compare the artistic approaches, though I’ll agree that Jules Rivera’s version of a kiss is certainly more of a cartoony smooch like you’d see in an episode of The Flintstones. Okay, maybe it’s not limited to just the kiss, either. The contrast is startling.

But cartoonist James Allen and his predecessors didn’t think it was necessary to spend/waste so much time on the usual Mark Trail’s Departure Scene as Rivera does. On the other hand, Cherry was certainly more of an old school, wifely worrywort before Rivera invigorated her.

Pre-Rivera, it used to be the case that Mark would say goodbye to Cherry on their porch, so getting driven to the airport these days at least gives us a bit more of what was most likely kept “behind the scenes.” Other than that, it’s kind of the same ol’ thing, except for Rivera’s humor.

Speaking of airports, for those of you coming in late: The “Tom Hill Airport” name is a reference to one of the earliest and best Mark Trail artists, who not only handled the earlier Sunday nature strips but also ghosted a lot of the dailies that had Jack Elrod’s name on them. 

Anyway, I’m kind of surprised. This is the usual set of panels that I would expect to see published on a Saturday, as Rivera wraps up the prologue for the week. So, what will we see tomorrow? It occurred to me that it would be very interesting if Rivera would include a sequence of Mark trying to get through TSA Security. If there was ever a situation where humor and bad luck was called for, that would be it.