Perhaps some pillow talk took place with Violet, resulting in getting Honest Ernest read into this story. It doesn’t sound as if he was specifically hired, so much as he is volunteering (once again). But why is Jules Rivera redoing the bats in the recital hall plot? Perhaps she has a “Some people never learn” moral she want to promote. It does seem odd that the characters act like this is not a story replay; especially Honest Ernest, whose last attempt at bat removal sent him to the ER to get anti-rabies shots from a bat bite. Now, if he gets too close to Cherry, she might wind up biting him.
But Cherry’s response in panel 2 is ambiguous and sounds like it is more a personal choice than obeying an existing law. She could simply have said “The law says we can’t move the bats until the babies can fly!” Not sure that Ernest is that much of a law-and-order kind of guy, but at least he would know the situation better.
While Mark gallivants around the region helping his dad and cosplaying a cave rescue expert, Cherry is “collecting” weeds. What does that even mean!? Does Cherry keep scrapbooks of weed samples? I’m suspicious. Anyway, one pulls weeds and then gets rid of them. With the amount of weeds Cherry has pulled, you’d think that she’d have a wheelbarrow on hand. Well, it’s her back, not mine!
It appears that Violet Cheshire has once again retained Honest Ernest and his funky, rusty, chemical sprayer in order to … let me guess … spray the weeds? Perhaps this also means that she and Ernest are still meeting on the sly, with Violet’s husband none the wiser. The sap.
But Cherry the Martyr—I mean Cherry Trail—continues to recognize and extend courtesy to Honest Ernest, in spite of what he’s tried to do to her and to Mark. It is amazing that the two could be within speaking distance of each other without Cherry trying to stick a weeding claw in his neck.
I suppose we’ll have yet another story about Violet hiring Ernest to do something she already paid Cherry to do, or to do something that conflicts with what Cherry is trying to do. Ho hum-drum. This could be a golden opportunity for Jules Rivera to widen the playing field by having Cherry get pissed at Violet and quitting. Then she could restart her independent landscape business and get jobs and new plots from other people in the area, like she originally did before meeting Violet. But she won’t.
Bats protected during breeding season? Well, that is a fact, in fact. Too bad Violet might have to reschedule. Such a tragedy it is, too!
However, I am still in the dark as to why Jules Rivera appears to be revising a plot from a few years ago. If this is all Rivera can do, perhaps it is time for her to make Cherry branch out and get some different jobs with other Lost Forest citizens or businesses. At the least, it could lead to new plots and characters. And Cherry’s stories could use some freshening up in the character department.
Art Dept. Oh, I like the “dripping paint” on the wall behind Violet in panel 3. It nicely reflects the disaster she is experiencing.
Don’t forget that Violet Cheshire has some kind of British background (in case you are confused by “Blimey” and her last name, “Cheshire”). However, Violet seems to have forgotten how her “Just make them go away!” approach worked out the last time. But Jules Rivera has learned a bit more about bats. So now she has instituted the “baby bats” plot twist into the story, based on a comment Mark mentioned last Sunday about not moving bats during baby raising.
But it’s too bad that Violet didn’t put any effort into “Bat Prevention” for the music hall after the first occurrence.
Art Dept. The salvation of today’s strip lies in the different layouts in the four panels. In fact, each panel offers a different and interesting viewpoint that reflects the dialog. This is reminiscent of Rivera’s earliest work on the strip. The top-down view in panel 3 is especially well-designed. The foreshortening of Violet works well enough to make the composition believable. This variety is a welcome advance from the usual one-view-fits-all layout that she too often relies on.
Well, how boring! I was sure Jules Rivera was going to pull a fast one, rather than revise a prior plotline. If she’s rerouting the river back under the same bridge (so to speak), does this mean that Violet is going to once again call on Honest Ernest for assistance?
However, we learned this past Sunday from Mark that moving bats on your own could be illegal at certain times of the year. Instead, he recommends calling the local Animal Control. Not sure they would actually do the heavy lifting. They normally only respond to domestic pet crises; so they would probably refer Cherry to a private pest control service, which would likely mean bringing in Honest Ernest, after all.
Lots more riffing on the bats-in-the-music hall story, though it’s the Fall concert instead of the Winter concert. But what’s all this shrieking business? Bats sleep in the daytime. So I still think Jules Rivera is throwing out a red herring. You’ve probably already figured this out, right? No!?
It’s one of two things: It’s a group of not-very-talented people practicing inside the music hall. Or we’ve just discovered what became of the cat family left in Violet’s care (“Kittens and Kablooey”, 2024).
Anyway, Cherry is being unnecessarily catty (panel 3) when referring to Violet’s harp recital. Recall that it was Cherry who interrupted Violet in the middle of her recital at the Winter concert in order to introduce her dad playing banjo with a feral cat “singing” along. Wait … Singing cat; shrieking horror sounds. I’m getting a bad feeling here.
Finally, because I know you’ll mention it if I don’t, I realize what Rivera has drawn in the window in panel 1. But I like my theory and I think it would be terribly disappointing if Rivera is playing this straight and just borrowing the “bats” plot from her earlier story. If that were the case, I’d have expected Cherry to say something about that, as well, to lean into the joke.
I think we’re all wondering just what a “stubborn rosebush” is, yes? It certainly can’t be for lack of budding roses.
Well, today’s strip threw my neck out of joint for a minute! Is Jules Rivera reviving a Mark Trail practice during the final Jack Elrod years of retooling old stories? The bats-in-the-music-hall plot device was first used back in 2023 (“The Good, The Bat, and The Ernest”), where Cherry and Violet were thinking about holding a winter music festival in this very hall.
Or is this just a windup to another joke? Recycling older Mark Trail adventures is well-documented by Mark Carlson-Ghost on his Mark Trail Confidential website: (https://www.markcarlson-ghost.com/index.php/2020/11/21/mark-trail-confidential/). You can read the article for more information. The pertinent section is labeled “Maddening! Mark Trail’s Recycled Tales (1979-2004).” But perhaps today’s strip is a nod to Mark Carlson-Ghost’s article. Frankly, I’d be surprised if this turns out to be anything other than a humorous reference to the 2023 adventure.
Well, well, well … looks like Cherry still has her life and her job! But I can’t say a lot about her gardening expertise. That’s how it is with stories, it seems. Characters get twisted and turned to fit whatever the story needs, rather than making the story fit the character. After all, Cherry is supposed to be an expert gardener.
It’s like Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation: An android supposedly possessing great strength, remarkable reflexes, and a mind the size of a planet (sorry, that’s Marvin, the depressed robot). Yet, the writers sometimes created stories where Data acted slow; was sometimes out-thought by mere humans (e.g. Kivas Fajo); or was physically bested by his “evil twin”, Lore. It’s like some kind of unwritten rule of the Fiction Universe that characters with impressive powers must have flaws and cannot appear superior to mere human beings for fear of making TV viewers feel paranoid or depressed. That’s why Superman wound up with kryptonite, I think. But that was a self-inflicted injury, as fans know; because Superman was not originally the super-flying, invulnerable character he morphed into. But I digress …
All in all, it is nice to have a change of scenery here, even if it is just for six days. But are we going to get anything of a worthy story out of this unimpressive episode? There must be something else afoot, other than the complications of transplanting rose bushes. Not that stubborn rose bushes can’t be a worthy problem in certain contexts, such as a person calling into Gardener’s Question Time on BBC 4 for advice. So we’ll have to wait a bit to see what Violet really has in mind for Cherry, after the audience laughter has subsided.
Art Dept. Today’s strip shows elements of rushed work: Boring fixed-camera views; characters and objects out of proportion to each other; schematic scenery. Some cynics <ahem!> will blame it on good weather and good surf, while others might respond with “Nothing new here.”
I sometimes make joking references to Stephen Pastis because of Jules Rivera’s love of puns. But Pastis’s puns are constructed from the text of the lead-up panels. On the other hand, the humor I see here looks more like what I find in Hi and Lois or Family Circus.
The Daily Trail 