Ah, Rex turns out to be another quick-to-judgement moralist. How unfortunate for Tess. But Gemma has returned to Center Stage by crashing through Tess’s secret trailer, the one that everybody already knew about and could actually see. Not really a secret. Of course, we know that Rivera really meant “the trailer that holds a secret”.

I think Rivera wastes valuable drawing space with a redundant textbox. How much more functional it would have been, had Rivera instead used the space as a teaser for the next day: “Mark saves Rex, but who will save Tess?”

When I see whole figures drawn in Mark Trail, sometimes it seems that Rivera uses old-fashioned action figure dolls as reference models. You know, the kind that swivel at the hips and whose arms tended to rotate like the blades of a windmill. There’s a definite sameness you can see.

Anyway, is the end for Tess Tigress? Will Emma finally be fed up and put her foot down?

Shouldn’t the real question be: “That’s terrible, Tess! How could your parents (or the zoo management) put you in that no-win situation!?” It doesn’t sound like Tess volunteered to put down Mama Elephant. But it also looks like lover boy Rex has some kind of absolutist morality which doesn’t discount age or maturity. Oh, poor Rex, moaning and condemning, like some upper-class snob discovering that his date does not a family pedigree equal to his own. Go ahead, Rex. Start casting stones.

I am curious to see how Rivera develops this scenario: Will she put forward the notion that this pachyderm put-down formed the basis for Tess’s current alleged animal mistreatment? Will Rivera try and show that Tess is a victim of circumstances out of her control?  Or will Mark suddenly pop up as a voice of wisdom, and come to Tess’s aid, rebuking Rex for his unrealistic moralizing? Or do we go down the usual path where Rex disavows Tess and walks off into the night, a disillusioned and broken shell of a man?

The syndicate’s servers crashed yesterday, as many (figuratively speaking) of you know, so time to catch up. And we’re back to the Mark Trail Whining Zoo adventure. Seems Emma the Elephant really did have a hard-on for Tess and somehow was able to zero in on her location, even crossing through four presumably unknown States. That’s pretty incredible orienteering.

So what is Tess busy with? Looks like the elephant is actually prancing away from the humans.  This would have made quite the illustrated report, had Mark remembered to bring a video camera and leave it on. But Mark has a habit of rarely taking photos on assignment, as far as I’ve been able to determine. Doesn’t seem like Rex is concerned about the business operation as much as the one-way relationship. Perhaps Rivera is winding this story down, as well, though there are more threads to account for.

On a side note, there is a new time-travel adventure strip from KFS: Mara Llave: Keeper Of Time. If you like classic illustration-style drawing (and who doesn’t?) and don’t mind a bit of sci-fi, check out this strip on Comics Kingdom. Perhaps the adventure strip format is not yet completely dead!

Wondering how Mark knew the elephant’s name (“Gemma”)? Me, too! I found it mentioned back in the July 19^th strip when Bill Ellis was trying to sell the assignment to Mark.  Ellis never said exactly where the elephant was, except that it was in the South. Rampaging Gemma could have trotted over from Arkansas, as far as we know, except that Bill also stated there were sightings across four (unnamed) states. In the end, who knows and who cares. Emma is In the House!

Nice tiger drawings, by the way. Sure, Rivera might be borrowing from web sources, but cartoonists have collected and used “swipe files” as reference material for at least 100 years. You didn’t really think the prior Mark Trail artists drew their animals from memory, did you?

Anyway, it seems Tony the Tiger got pretty docile once Gemma showed up. I think Rex should win the test by default, don’t you? He didn’t try to run away, and wasn’t that the point of the test?

The grammar today is careless. In panel 1, the phrase should be “Mark can only look on in horror….” And panel 2 is ambiguous. It should be either “…Buzz, your dog?” or “…Buzz? Your dog!”

Still, I think I’m on Tess’s side here. She can’t be too happy to see that Rex might throw her over for a dog (which he could continue to have, even if he stays with Tess). Still, I’m hoping Rex sticks it out.

But as I (and most of you, I bet) was counting on, the Runaway Bunny, er, Elephant has shown up at just the right time to change the course of this adventure. And it sure knows how to make an appearance!

Side note:  Based on the dietary needs of elephants, we should expect to see a very long, virtually plowed, path behind Dumbo, emptied of grasses, trees, and bushes, but replaced by piles of pachyderm poop. Yet surprisingly, nobody could track this animal!

When you design an adventure strip around “the absurd”, the whacky, and the just plain strange, it becomes harder to deliver an acceptably dramatic, potentially dangerous scenario.

But somebody has been misled:  Rex stated that his ordeal was to prove his devotion specifically to Tess, whereas Tess just declared that Rex is actually pledging himself to the Tiger Touch Center. I think there is a crucial communication problem that Rex needs to resolve. Mark seems to be at a loss for what to do. How un-Mark Trail. Just as well.

I am impressed with Rivera’s drawing of the ground-level, foreshortened tiger approaching Rex. Well done, Rivera!

I’m not a fan of how this story is evolving. If Rex wants to do what seems on the surface to be an idiotic and possibly dangerous activity, it’s his business, just like he says. After all, Tess might be a tigress in more than just name. As we can see, there’s no evidence Rex is being held against his will or even under the influence of a drug. And this is clearly just a psychological test, not a test of actual danger.

Mark, just do your job! Set up the camera, press the red button, and contemplate your next award for hard-hitting nature reporting. And Jules, Mark is not a social worker. Stop it!

So, what do you think?

Well, let’s look at this situation positively:  If the lion mauls Rex, Mark knows that the place is truly corrupt, as is Tess. Furthermore, he no longer has to fret over Rex’s mental stability. So, my advice to Mark is “Find whoever is handling bets and place your money on the lion. Afterward, go write your blasted article.” At the very least, Mark should be filming this spectacle. Might be the catalyst for a new Reality Show.

On the other hand, the alleged “rampaging elephant” could show up in the nick of time and stomp the tiger, just before it bites Rex’s head off. I mean, it just has to show up at some point, don’t you think?

And I thought for sure that the prior time Mark had a 3-week run was a fluke, as the tradition has been 2 weeks of Mark to every 1 week of Cherry. So why the change to three weeks? Inflation?

In any event, some time has passed and yet another odd twist to the story appears. The Tiger Truth Ceremony, is it? I have a pretty good idea where this is going. But I’m surprised the retaining walls here are so low. Certainly tigers can jump those heights with ease. In fact, all reports I’ve found state tigers can jump heights greater than ten feet.

But poor Rex. He’s hooked on a woman—without qualification—who yet insists he satisfies her own qualification test with some kind of Neolithic “Survivor” ceremony to see if he is worthy. Unless this is a scam, of course. I wonder how Diana Daggers is taking all of this? As I projected several weeks ago, she has become less of a meaningful character/opponent and more of a scene conductor, somebody to just help Mark get from one phase of the story to the next.

When Jules Rivera first started on Mark Trail 2.0, I figured Cherry would be the one truly grounded in strength, reality, and reason. And she has been, now and then. I think she is not in that orbit at the moment. She seems to be living in the same irrational, emotional, and transactional world of hubby, Mark.

The rampaging elephant buildup has been going on since Mark arrived in Texas, with no sign of abatement. Never mind that, in the real world, the notion that an elephant could elude capture or destruction for more than a day is ludicrous. Never mind that an elephant halfway across a strange country could no more hone in on the Tiger Touch Center in Texas than Garfield could be a genuinely funny comic strip.

As Mark Trail 1.0 was a simple world of black-and-white morality, predictable events, and two-bit baddies, Mark Trail 2.0 is a more complicated, colorful world of surprise, outrageousness, inconsistency, and unpredictable behavior. With two-bit weird baddies.

Well, maybe that rampaging elephant will buck reality and, somehow, suddenly show up to trample Tess’s dreams of fame and wealth. It might wind up doing something similar to what Mark Trail 1.0 used to do: Employ its Flying Tusks of Justice to shut things down.

Rivera adds some emotional complexity to the story, but the two plot elements strike me as disparate. (1) There is the Tiger Touch Center and the alleged disappearance of mama tigers. There seems to be some evidence of neglect and bad management, but Mark’s estimate of the tiger cubs-to-mama tigers ratio has not been demonstrated. (2) There is the issue of Rex’s infatuation for Tess that Mark finds troublesome. Of course, whether Rex wants to stay with Tess is none of Mark’s business (nor Diana’s for that matter). How do disappearing tigers impact Rex’s status? Dunno! Perhaps it is Rex’s reputation that Mark is concerned about, or Rex’s legal status if he is around when the proper authorities ultimately show up to shut down the Center and start arresting people.

I don’t think Rivera needs to exaggerate the drama through the expressions and reactions of Mark and Cherry; it seems too close to the scripted drama of Reality TV.