From a purely moral basis, even Violet should know that this is not Cherry’s M.O. But I reckon this outburst does fit Violet’s character. Will she apologize? Hah! Did you also think it strange that Cherry felt the need to explain to Violet what kudzu is? I don’t think there is anybody south of the Mason-Dixon Line who doesn’t already know.
Once again, this could be an interesting adventure, but we’ll have to wait and see if it descends into farce and is unresolved. It is interesting to note that Rivera posted a Sunday nature talk on kudzu before it was introduced into the current story.
Really? That’s the worst question to hear from your boss? Not in my experience, at least. But clearly there is something more to this question than a simple “Of course not!” response could satisfy. Cherry does look a bit guilty in panel 4.
Art Dept. I wonder if Rivera likes attending theater, because once again, the scene in panel 1 looks more like actors performing on stage with painted scenery: the decorative flatness of the flora, the simple overlapping placement of bushes and trees, and the generic ambiguity of the distant mountains provide a simple backdrop to the characters on center stage.
Having some down time, Mark wanted to experience some warm, fuzzy family time, but Cherry had a gardening job and Rusty was setting off with his friends to investigate something mysterious in the forest. Mark really wanted more time with Rusty, so he chased him down, getting him to reveal that he and friends are going to inspect a possible “E.T.” sighting. Mark bribed Rusty with the use of his digital camera and a pizza lunch so that he could tag along.
The last time Mark tried to bond with Rusty was when he took him and his friends out on a borrowed boat at night to hunt for the “Bassigator” cryptid but grounded the boat on an island of unusually docile alligators. While Mark fretted, the kids loved it.
For those not in the know, kudzu really is a big problem. There are places, mostly in the south, where it looks like the land is just one big growth of kudzu, shaped like whatever it is growing over. You’re gonna need a hell of a lot of goats to control this stuff.
I thought it was interesting to see that Rivera, who usually likes to have a pun in the final panel, blew this one: “Goats are really the greatest of all time!” Of course Rivera was spelling out the acronym, but that’s like explaining a joke. If you have to spell it out, it isn’t a joke. She should have written “Goats are really the GOAT!” Just my opinion.
Yup, Mark is scamming his own kid with that “too dangerous for you boys” line so he can poke his nose into their business. So, where is that camera? Unlike smart phones, a DSLR is a bit large for a pocket (unless you happen to be Captain Kangaroo). Alas, poor Rusty. He should have trusted his instincts. Nothing says “fun” like having your dad tag along when you go meet your friends.
Phew. Today’s setup and dialog seem like a parody of 1960s TV shows. Maybe Rivera still believes her target audience consists mostly of Boomer Generation readers. Maybe she’s right (though I’ve never found any statistics from her syndicate). After all, who even calls cops “Fuzz” anymore?
I dunno. Is Mark just playing along by humoring Rusty with his aliens search? And why does Rivera deliberately make Mark out to be a clownish hypocrite, then mock him for it (panel 4)? I suppose I shouldn’t be too harsh. As parents, we were sometimes guilty of “Do as I say, not as I do!” behavior.
Still, one can’t get over the notion that Rivera is set against maintaining Mark Trail’s traditional image as a steadfast source of parental rectitude. Since pre-Rivera Mark Trail’s morality was a 1950s-time capsule, that’s probably not too bad of an idea. Maybe we’ll get more clarity on Saturday.
Mark being confused is rather common, isn’t it? But once again, Rusty disses dad about his social shortcomings. Cryptids are so Old News. Kids have (re)discovered alien incursions, previously the interest of corn farmers and Art Bell enthusiasts. Let’s hope this topic leads to a very interesting and fruitful story. At least until Mark gets his usual phone call.
Mark sure seems like a needy dad trying to make up for not being around. I’ll cut him a lot of slack here. Most of us fathers know how it feels! But the pre-Rivera Mark Trail never seemed too concerned about his fatherly duties. At the same time, pre-Rivera Rusty rarely seemed to go anywhere, much less have friends.
Anyway, I sure hope that tiny log structure in the background of panel 1 is just one of the out-buildings on the Trail estate and not meant to be the actual family home. That would be ridiculous.
Finally, Mark must have touched a nerve with Rusty, because his façade of calm quickly evaporated when Mark pressed him for details. I sure hope it is something really interesting. But will Mark stay out of it?
Rusty might get into trouble!? Gosh, Mark! Did you forget to set up a chaperoned play date? What a Millennial you are! Just let the little bastards play. It’s not as if Rusty is still six. Frankly, after that Bassigator Boat disaster, I’m surprised any parents will let their kids come anywhere near your place.
Maybe you can be Cherry’s gardening assistant today, Mark! Then you and Cherry can both get that call from the hospital telling you Rusty broke his arm falling out of a tree in a climbing contest with those other hooligans. Or they might go off on one of those “Stand By Me” adventures. Come to think of it, maybe you should spend the day shadowing Rusty, Mark.
Well, since Mark just got back from his trip, I reckon this would be his first family breakfast since returning. But would it have made any difference if this was the second breakfast? Just wondering.
Anyway, it sounds like Cherry has another job, possibly with a client that is not the Sunny Soleil Society. That’s cool. Poor Mark has to finish his breakfast without the family. But fair’s fair! Mark hasn’t been around for their breakfasts, either. Still, there might be options for Mark.
Such as Doc Davis. He’s part of the family; so where is he? Those pancakes won’t stay warm very long.
This week blew by fast. Well, I had a bad cold for several days, so I might have misinterpreted the passage of time. But once the first breezes of fall start blowing, time just seems to take wing (yeah, I know the days get shorter, but don’t rain on my clichés). Mark held a week-long review with Cherry of what happened after his train adventure suddenly ended. I am overall fine with a more detailed look at consequences, since the pre-Rivera MT period tended to give them short shrift. What do you think? Speaking of things moving fast, it’s amazing how quickly these events resolved, unless it was due to the fact that Mark took four weeks to hike home from Columbus, Ohio. What happened?
Mark was officially cleared of wrongdoing by law enforcement.
Sally Scorpius is shacking up with Happy Trail down in Florida.
Law enforcement discovered Senator Small’s many years of bribes and corruption more quickly than any episode “Law & Order.”
It suddenly dawned on people that, those laws Senator Small pushed through the state senate were designed to undermine, overwork, and endanger train employees.
Somehow, Mark’s livestream rant caught the attention of the EPA, which is going to have the Duck Duck Goose transportation company pay for all of the cleanup costs.
Rex Scorpius is providing personal motivational therapy to “faux professor” Bee Sharp, who is very distraught over his face being used by DDG without his permission. It seems the idea of being the victim (instead of the perpetrator) of fraud was just too much for Sharp.
Mark came home with the wildebeest.
Mark and Cherry’s log cabin house seems to have shrunk (could be optical illusion).
Panel 1 is quite calligraphic, but I have no idea what the underlying figure is. Wait, I see. It’s the Leafy Sea Dragon shown later in the strip. A bit of mixed and unsupported messaging: Why should we always reach for the stars? In fact, in panel 5, Mark argues against going into space in order to segue to the mysteries of terran life forms. Rivera makes a good point about the diversity of interesting life forms on Earth, at least. And looking at enlarged images of tiny creatures is sometimes like seeing extra-terrestrials.
There they are, once again. Cherry and Mark dissing the Midwest and doing a Hallmark-approved hug in front of their trendy “tiny log cabin house”, rather than one of those big, family-sized homes that just cry “Boomers Live Here!” Mark appears to have spared Ohio from having to deal with a wildebeest by bringing it home. Maybe it will become friends with Andy. Or gore him.
Art Dept. I’m disappointed. Owing to Rivera’s greater appreciation for wildlife, I would have expected her depiction of a ruby-throated hummingbird to be a bit more “realistic”, at least in the wings department. This should have been an obvious subject for her creativeness. Instead, the hummer looks like the kind of “frozen” image you see on wildlife paintings and hi-speed camera photos. Ho-humming bird.
Mark is being hypocritical with his criticism of movie studio ethics, given his own willingness to indulge in law breaking and fisticuffs with law enforcement (and not just in this story!). Call me old-fashioned, by I don’t see how this characteristic enhances the Mark Trail brand in any positive way.
Movie and production studios do seem intent upon using AI scans of actors for their own purposes, which has also been one of the key complaints in the current actors’ strike. I would not be surprised if some studio put out a film composed entirely of AI-generated actors, selling it to gullible viewers as a new technological breakthrough, rather than the cynical, money-grubbing scam that it would be. Actually, there is a 12-minute “movie” (more of a trial), completely fashioned with AI (though not using images of actual actors). You can view it here. Frankly, it’s rather primitive and looks like computer game imagery from years ago. But I digress.
We have to remember that this is “Mark’s World”, not the Real World. The very idea that a train spilling toxic chemicals would not have caught the attention of the EPA and other federal officials seems unlikely; just as unlikely that, somehow, somebody at the EPA caught Mark’s livestream report. And now we are to believe that there was a media blackout of the event. In the strip, there were several reporters at Mark and Happy’s fight, er, press conference. According to local news sources (in the Real World), there was no news blackout; just initial “indifference” from national news sources. Apparently, the national news services were focused more on the so-called Chinese Spy Weather Balloon.
I should have found this stuff earlier. An article (“TikTok becomes ground zero for toxic Ohio train derailment news as users push against ‘media blackout’”) by Mikael Thalen for “The Daily Dot” reported that national media gave the event short shrift, Tik Tokers were all over it, noting that locals were reporting lots of dead fish. An interesting TikTok video is linked in the story (think Mark). The TikTok user made a point of stating that officials and media sources mostly just repeated the PR line from the railroad. So, it seems clear where Rivera got at least some of her inspiration and material: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/tiktok-east-palestine-ohio-train-derailment/
Okay, Mark’s World is a terribly weird place where cops look like park employees with guns, senators get bribed with illegally obtained exotic animals, and small-time environmental reporters get into fistfights with cops without getting arrested or sued. But what about the spill, Mark?
Whatnew friends, Mark: The cops who pursued you? The state senator you had arrested? The wildebeest?
And is this going to be a week-long epilog? I hope that Mark updates Cherry on the payoff of his muscle car livestream exposé. Did his site jump to 1,000 followers yet? I never quite figured out how Mark’s livestream was supposed to generate increased viewership, based on his limited reputation and small online presence. I was shocked that Senator Smalls found out about it and listened. Amazing! Did Mark stick around to learn what really happened with the train explosion, rather than depend on the testimony of Rex Scorpius? Well, this was really Happy’s idea in the first place, and Mark was not on assignment. So he can get a pass. This time.
Art Dept: Can’t say that I like that background in panel 1. Rather than a typically smooth gradation from light to dark, it looks like Rivera placed strips of increasingly dark values side by side, as if this was a color theoryclass assignment. But check out the B&W newspaper version of panel 1: The striping effect we see in color is less noticeable in black & white. Of course, newsprint has low resolution, which helps smooth the transition. But that is accidental, as Rivera clearly relies on color.
As both stories have concluded, we must endure the reunion of Cherry and Mark once again; it’s likely going to take up the entire week! Stand by for a bunch of “what happened to...?” updates. So exactly how did Mark get home? Did he hire an Uber? Maybe he accidentally “on purpose” left his dad back in Ohio because Happy wanted to take the train back home (assuming it was not flooded out).
Well, those squirrels sure look like giant cutouts to me. Else, why the heavy outlining? In fact, panel 1 looks more like a theater stage set. Just take a look at that mise en scène: Mark and Cherry happen to meet outside, artfully posed. The props (squirrels and green stuff) in front establish a foreground space to offset the middle “stage” space. That “cabin” has to be part of the painted background. It’s too small to be a real cabin. And that background scenery looks too scant to be real! Well, perhaps that log house is just a storage shed or maybe where Rivera stores Rusty and Doc when they’re not needed in the story.
This week produced a relatively positive morality play in which Cherry helps one person that results in helping another. After a short phone conversation with Mark, who relayed the results of his Ohio fishing trip, Cherry’s day of reflecting on friend Georgia and the lost bees is interrupted by Violet Cheshire. She needed help removing hibiscus plants because they could cause an allergic reaction in the Sunny Soleil Society’s president. What to do with all of those flowers? Not a problem for Cherry who suddenly gets inspired to take them to Georgia’s place where they can attract bees to repopulate the empty bee hives. Voila! Like Rick and Capt. Renault in “Casablanca” walking off into the distance and talking about the start of a new friendship, Cherry and Georgia walked off into the distance talking about the start of something good for the bees. Okay, it’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s in a similar spirit of friendship. And it’s Bogart! Mentioning Humphrey Bogart in a post is always a great way to make your writing seem more thoughtful.
The well-drawn trail marker in today’s title panel is based on a long-recognized pun. Similar text was very likely the basis for the name of Ed Dodd’s hero. There is, for example, the “High Water Mark Trail” in the Ozarks. I always wondered if Mark’s name was based on some distinctive, functional purpose, like the “mark twain” phrase, being a boatman’s call for a specific water depth. But I don’t know.
In any event, today Rivera breaks her tradition a bit by posting a subject sharing nothing specifically relevant with either Mark’s or Cherry’s storylines or locations. No big deal. As usual, the wildlife is drawn in a more detailed and representational form (i.e., shading/volume), whereas Mark is shown in his standard flat, cartoonish style that rarely displays shading.
And the next day, Georgia gets a bill from the Sunny Soleil Society to pay for the hibiscus. So, is Rivera wrapping up this story, as well?
BTW: Commenter Daniel P made an interesting observation yesterday about the lack of any “evil doer” in Cherry’s story. That is so. Mostly, it’s been about recovering the bee population in Georgia’s bee hives that were lost to “colony collapse disorder.” It’s a pertinent observation.
Daniel’s comment made me think (and that hurts!). There is almost always an antagonist that the protagonist (Mark or Cherry) has to defeat. Cherry’s current adventure might be a departure from this standard hero-villain format and more of a story about everyday problem-solving and relationships. Instead of a human villain, the antagonist here is natural processes that have to be overcome or worked around.
Still, there may yet be a human villain on the other side of the bush!
It’s nice to see that Cherry’s mind can keep up with us astute readers! Okay, so it was not a terribly complicated idea. But that means, if I also thought of it, then there must be something about to go wrong. Maybe Cherry gets billed by Violet for the flowers.
Scroll down and you will soon see the post for Monday, being the conclusion of Mark’s train adventure.
(Tue) Solve what problem? It seems to me talking with Mark creates problems. Anyway, standing beside a nice carving of a male cardinal (it is a carving, right?), Cherry gets interrupted by Violet Cheshire, possibly signaling the start a new story. Like Mark, Cherry’s stable of opponents seems to be limited. This does not bode well, but we can hope for a new nemesis.
Ignorance and Arrogance: Always a bad combination!
(Wed) One might have thought that Violet would already know whether the SSS president likes hibiscus flowers, as well as whether she is allergic to them, especially given Violet’s prominent position (whatever that is). Apparently, Violet purchased and installed these new flowers without conferring with Cherry or having her do the installation. Does Cherry even still work for the Sunny Soleil Society? Violet seems unfazed and unconcerned. Rivera has made Violet’s pettiness, insecurity, and shallowness transparent from the start. So why would Cherry be surprised?
Cherry ponders the fate of the hibiscus.
(Thur) Let’s just ask the obvious question: Why can’t whoever put them in take them out? Seems pretty logical, right? In any event, out they go! But where, Cherry wonders? I have an idea: Plant them over at Georgia’s place to attract new bees. In fact, there is a special hibiscus bee, but it tends to be solitary, and it nests underground in hard soil by salt marshes. Fortunately, the hibiscus can attract other bees, too.
The Daily Trail 