Well, was yesterday a replay or the beginning of Mark’s second day on the job? Simon Stump is no longer hanging around, nor are the rest of the guests, so let’s assume this is Day Two. We can’t tell from the clothing, since most characters wear the same clothes all the time. This is a tradition in comic strips going as far back as The Yellow Kid, in which the clothes act as kind of identification badge or part of the character’s inherent identity. Little Orphan Annie almost always wore a red dress. Charlie Brown was always in shorts and a t-shirt with a horizontal zigzag stripe. Mark used to always wear a plain work shirt with two button-down pockets. Now it’s a red checked shirt, recently enhanced with a black tee undershirt. A bit of progress, perhaps.
Aside from yet another possibly unnecessary textbox in panel 4, this looks like a little story stretching going on. Or perhaps this is a setup for these three goofs to encounter a bear on their walk and either call out for Mark to come save them or retreat to camp to report the encounter. With luck, they could get “kidnapped” by the bear and never seen again.
Okay, it’s been a week, so I reckon it’s okay to shove in a quick “recap” of the preceding events. But the fact Rivera changed the topography in panel 1 from the prior layout is not mere carelessness, but it was clearly done for the sake of design: a classic diagonal sweep that provides a more pleasing sense of compositional movement than a dead-on, orthogonal left-to-right layout would do. Is the care creeping along or is Mark just sitting in it while he rhapsodizes over his fortunes? It’s virtually impossible to illustrate a car creeping along, as opposed to moving at highway speed.
Mark is on the job! Driving across hill-and-dale to reach the nature retreat, Mark met tech impresario and Retreat founder, Simon Stump, sporting a Tintin haircut. I wonder if Simon’s name is supposed to be a pun of some sort? Frankly, I’m stumped.
Not only is Simon worried about bears, he worries that bears might have kidnapped (his word) the other journalist (paraphrasing reader Downpuppy, “where is the ransom note?”). If that isn’t enough, Jules Rivera included almost all of Mark Trail’s prior opponents for the past two years as current guests at the Retreat! Isn’t hunting down bears and a missing journalist enough of an adventure (as it would have been in the old days)? Rivera seems to think that continuing to recycle these same sociopaths and con artists provides some kind of secret sauce to her plot recipes.
Yet, they are not even proper bad guys or villains; just twisted jerks. Sure, Mark does not need to face down super-villains like “Dr. Doom”, “Professor Moriarty”, or “Darth Vader.” But he could face a few actual bad guys willing to hurt, frame, or dispose of Mark for getting in the way of their plans. In most stories by Rivera, Mark’s life or reputation have never been under serious threat. Well, there was one, minor incident.
You might recall the recent zebra mussels adventure, where a shipping tycoon (also now at the Retreat) sent some knee-breakers to scare Mark off his assignment. However, the two goons quickly went down like sacks of rocks off a cliff. And that was that. A ripping good adventure could have taken place where the two pursued a fleeing Mark Trail down the river and through the woods in a serious life-or-death struggle. Whacky has its place, but I’d like to see Rivera integrate more actual suspenseanddanger into some of Mark’s stories. He needs to exercise his survival skills from time to time. Aside from aping Tintin’s haircut, Rivera could learn a thing or two from studying that Belgian teen’s adventures.
For those who think Rivera spends too much time on climate change, she frequently spotlights traditional Sunday topics, such as this one. I’m never quite sure if Rivera deliberately exaggerates Mark’s pointer finger (panel 5). It frequently looks like he’s holding another object in his hand. Hands and feet can be notoriously difficult to draw well. Go ahead, try it!
Taming wild bears, is it? Poor Mark, surrounded by posers and grifters. So why do Mark’s “enemies” just stand around in a straight line, as if they’re posing for a group photo? Maybe to maximize the effect of their being there. Now, what’s Mark’s next move? Maybe he’ll questions these guests to learn whether they have anything to do with the ursine incursions.
Moving on, now that we’ve spent the past few weeks getting Mark’s adventure off and running, it should be time to spend a week with Cherry. No, not like that! Will it be make-up time with Violet Cheshire, pancakes with Jeanine, or maybe another secret mission with the underground garden club?
Okay, class: From our earlier discussions, we should all know by now how to properly interpret panel 3, correct? Yes, Sally. Panel 2 does confuse the chronology. Good catch!
So, Simon is greatly relieved that True Tech magazine sent another writer? You’d think that he would rather have a hunter or game warden on site, instead. It seems obvious that the bear is not afraid of journalists. But heck, even editor Rod Radagast’s only reaction to the loss of one journalist is to send in another one, as if this was a player substitution on a football team.
No worries, now that Mark is on the trail <ahem!>. I wonder if Mark ever watched Dick Proenneke’s films about living in the Alaskan wilderness, and brought along something for his own self-defense?
But wait: What if this bear survived a careless forest fire in Oregon and traveled across country to seek revenge against the reckless actions of two knuckleheaded brothers? I believe there is precedent!
I’m going through a Paxlovid (Covid) rebound this week, which ain’t much fun. And this story is not helping. Craziness for the sake of craziness does not a good story make, so I hope Rivera has a good plot for this adventure; and that would include good reasons why these particular people just happen to be at this retreat.
Should I laugh, cry, or just break wind? Hard to get my head around this. And I’m not sure “rivals” is the correct term. Better choices would be: “constant irritants”, “thorns in my flesh”, or “I grew up watching Batman, so I’ll keep running into the same jerks over and over.” But I don’t recall the lady in pink. Anybody have an idea? She looks like Bee Sharp’s Significant Other. I don’t mind having past no-goodniks showing up from time to time, but this is an overdone soufflé.
However, it’s good to see that Rivera keeps up on current trends and fads, such as ChatGPT, and that she can quickly fold it into a Mark Trail adventure while it’s still in the news.
In other words, “I do not think it means what you think it means”, as Inigo Montoya opined to Vizzini. But names—however misapplied—have a habit of sticking around, like the “Canary Islands”, named for wild dogs, not tweety birds. I wonder if Stump is such the genius that he expects Mark to have immediately formed an opinion of his retreat, or if he is just testing Mark for some reason.
I’m thinking Rivera does not do 3/4, rear-facing heads very often; hence Mark’s profile face in panel 2. Also, the broad space and scale that Rivera seems to be trying to suggest in panel 1 could have been improved by putting the station wagon farther “back”, so that we only see its front extending out from the lower left corner of the panel. It would then set a scale to more dramatically emphasize the receding space and avoid the question of why Mark is walking from the right side of the vehicle.
Of course, Rivera may not have intended any of this, anyway.
Here in the Twin Cities, we’ve had a miserable day of cold, rain, and ice, as if we were on the east or west coast! So, hooray for Mark and his splendid view!
Well, some of Rivera’s best work is her landscapes. Even Mark is well drawn, approaching her early strips in quality. Maybe the joy of drawing the landscapes rubbed off on her depiction of Mark. But I do wish she would resist the popular trend of drawing heavy outlines around objects, such as the squirrel. Totally unnecessary and distracting, I think.
We are moving deeper and deeper into Mark’s newest adventure, babysitting a crowd of tech workers at some nearby mountain retreat. I might be overstating the case. This past week Mark kept trying to get the right information from editor Rod Radagast about a matter of fighting bears. Turns out that under cross-examination, the original investigative journalist might have been talking about water bears. Mark explained the difference between real bears and water bears, but to little avail, as the editor clearly lacked the proper educational background. Well, this was the week that was, I reckon. With luck, Mark will end this tortured interview and get on with the project. Until then, check this out:
Water bears? What a surprise! Clearly, the outer space gimmick has Rivera’s attention, since she repeats the assocation. But what else can one say about tardigrades? They don’t make good pets. They are food for other tiny creatures.
Wikipedia reports that their very taxonomy is still an ongoing concern. Yet, in spite of their small size, there seems to be some fossilized examples from the Cambrian and Cretaceous eras. I think we have to give special awards to the paleontologists who found these examples, given that the average size of a tardigrade is only0.020 in.
Rabid Rod continues to emote like Charles Nelson Reilly, as Mark probably starts thinking that working-from-home ain’t such a great idea. It sounds quite possible that naïve Rod just got things totally mixed up from the start.
For example, it couldactually have been a real bear chasing the journalist in the water who called in while he was being chased. Rod might have misheard his call: “Bear!<huff> Water! <puff> Bear…” or something incoherent like that. Or it could be actual ginormous water bears that inadvertently grew 10 feet tall because of radioactive pollutants in a nearby river. Either way works for a Mark Trail article.
But finally, let’s not overlook the message box in panel 4: A hint for the Sunday nature chat?
Preppy dresser Mark schools editor Rod Radagast in a fundamental biological difference between ursidae and tardigrada. If nothing else, Mark should feel relieved in the same way Rod should be embarrassed. Then again, any dude wearing granny shades is probably immune to such feelings.
So, we were all set up by Rivera with that “fighting bears” gag. I reckon either Rod Radagast (okay, so we see Rivera has read some Tolkien) did not properly explain things to Bill Ellis, or he thinks a water bear and a bear are the same thing, so no reason to bother being specific in his explanations. Not a good take for a magazine editor, he could have looked it up.
Optional visual analysis follows for those with more time and interest: Rivera employs yet another visual technique (Rod’s extended hand) linking present-time (panel 1) to a past action (panel 2). Rivera employs various solutions for presenting past events within the context of current time. Here are the ones I tend to see. Maybe you’ve seen others?
As we recently saw in the Texas roadside zoo adventure, the white-bordered image of Mark superimposes itself over the background scene to underscore that the latter is a recalled event. This is one of Rivera’s most common techniques.
From the family vacation in Oregon (03/24/22) comes another technique involving thought balloon bubbles floating across multiple panels to illustrate a past sequence of events. The narrated past action begins in panel 2 and continues into panel 3. Obviously, the amount of dialog and action meant that Rivera could not use the prior technique. Rod Radagast’s overlapping hand in today’s strip is a variant of this one, reinforced by the “quoted dialog” in the textbox.
Looking back to the Zebra Mussels story comes the following depiction (11/11/21). It may be unique but requires context. Earlier in the story (11/04/21), Diana Daggers lamented to Mark that she was angry to discover that her boss—Professor Bee Sharp—was investing her salary in NFTs and converting it into digital currency. Note that nowhere else in the strip for 11/11/21 is Diana mentioned or shown!
While Sharp reviews new photos for NFTs, the background scene is his own visualization of what Diana revealed to Mark. The link between present and past is not a highlighted body or thought bubbles, but the use of color and silhouette. And Sharp is clearly in the room twice: as a silhouette in the past and himself in the present (note the light on his shoulders). Perhaps Sharp’s “No problems on my end!” comment textually applies to the photos as well as his talk with Daggers as he recalls the earlier encounter.
So, is Rivera now setting up Mark just to get in her own snarky comments (panel 4)? Not sure that’s fair to the rest of us, Jules, unless we get a chance to write some of the plot in return. Otherwise, panel 2 shows us that the North America Syndicate has certainly opened its Mark Trail archives to Rivera to provide the necessary “prior knowledge” Bill Ellis mentioned earlier.
Still, we seem to finally be moving past this four-day-and-counting “I have to fight bears?” meme. We get it, Rivera! Let’s just move this train down the line.
I can tell you that the Paxlovid regimen has greatly shortened the intensity of my misery and pain. I can even walk up/down the stairs. But I’ll be officially isolated until at least Friday. I fear COVID will join the yearly vaccine lineup, along with pneumonia and the flu. But, on with the show!
Monday: Yes, exactly where did the STEM nerds set up their retreat? And what are they doing—leaving their food out in the open in picnic baskets? I don’t know about you, but if this strip was animated, I’d bet that Bill Ellis would come off like Max Headroom, the pioneering “A.I. TV avatar” of the 1980s. Otherwise, I think we’re back to another adventure in Crazy Time.
Tuesday: Somehow, I’m getting the feeling that Bill Ellis will say or do just about anything. But really, this is nuts. If there actually was a bear issue, wouldn’t somebody have already called a game warden or local park service? Somehow, “nature journalist” doesn’t come to mind when I think “RAMPAGING BEARS!” Then again, maybe it’s the result of the STEM nerds getting plastered every night and doing really stupid things, such as posing for selfies near bears, petting bear cubs, etc., like tourists sometimes do at Jellystone, er, Yellowstone Park. Anyway, this could be a prime audience for some Mark Trail Outbursts Of Rage!
By the way, I overlooked a prior bear engagement that Mark Ellis may have referred to. It began back around mid-April 2014 when Mark had a jeep accident by Obie Falls in Lost Forest and was pursued by a black bear. Adventure ensued. Check it out on our archives.
Editor’s Note: I came down with COVID on Saturday and feel like crap. But I’m also taking those paxlovid pills and hope they shorten this misery. Depending on how things go, I may have to post several days at once, later in the week. Just so you know, I wrote most of this stuff before the COVID hit me.
Despite an error-prone week of mixed up and missed postings on my part, I think we were still able to get the gist of Mark’s recent travails. Thinking he had a million-dollar idea for working from home, Mark’s attempt to sell an article on alligator migration and climate change met with sober disinterest from editor/corporate avatar, Bill Ellis.
Cherry, led to believe Mark’s idea was already a done deal, was surprised to learn otherwise. But Rivera cut away before we could learn whether Mark suffered the sometimes fate of Jiggs, the beleaguered husband in the old “Bringing Up Father” comic strip (which would likely not get published these days. Ah, the good ol’ days of slapstick humor).
Throwing a bone to Mark, Ellis suggested he take on an assignment to nursemaid a bunch of STEM “professionals”—presumably public school teachers of science, tech, engineering, and math—at a nearby mountain retreat. This will supposedly allow Mark to come home every night. Anyway, it’s clear enough Mark was around long enough to put together today’s nature lecture. So, check it out!
So, what I get from this is that the former versions of Mark Trail were the traditional alpha male type now in disrepute. Rivera’s take on Mark clearly fits the newer standard. Some quick online searches seem to confirm Rivera’s (Mark’s) explanation.
Mark finally does have a chance to work for a different magazine in F.E. & Cook’s bullpen of 17 magazines, “True Tech”. Hooray, at least. I wasn’t aware that Mark had any “Davy Crockett” in him, however. Ah, perhaps Bill indulges in some sarcasm, recalling Mark’s recent petting zoo investigation that involved a meeting between Rex Scorpius and a loose bear?
Well, this assignment does sound like something more in the line of a traditional Mark Trail story. I don’t know how the logistics are going to work out if this is some kind of mountain retreat, but I’m sure we’ll find out pretty soon. Home every night? I doubt it.
The Daily Trail 