This post wound up looking more like a bunch of disconnected thoughts thrown together in no order…and it was!

Well, “snooty” might apply (to the house and the woman’s name), as Doc surmised, but “oddball” also seems appropriate. Take that plate of stepped-on biscuits, I mean, scones. Who piles them on a plate like that, anyway? That’s hardly the posh thing to do. And not very hygienic, if you are inviting visitors to simply grab one out of the pile! Still, if you are going to serve them, where is the clotted cream and marmalade? I mean, really! Well, let’s not get too much into the pronunciation of “scones”, as both versions are acceptable.

But I’d bet Violet pronounces it “scahns”, as it sounds upper class. This is where one can appreciate Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip, where Kelly sometimes used typography to suggest the speaker’s intonation and accent. You see that, Jules!?

Today’s strip also nicely illustrates a contextual use of color: If I was looking at this strip in my local paper which publishes the comics in black & white, I would not see the violet hues used in Cheshire’s office, thus missing the visual pun.

Wonder which one initiated the left-handed handshake? Usually only done for somebody with a bum right arm. But maybe this was purely a design choice. The nicely flowing line from Cherry to Violet would look awkward if they shook right-handed.

Back to the story: While an Eastern Chipmunk contentedly munches away, Cherry mostly keeps her cool and gets down to business with Violet. Story-wise, it’s a decently-paced sequence, with a polite overture thrown in for the sake of atmosphere.

As in her first Mark Trail outing, Jules juggles two concurrent, but different, story lines. Rather difficult to do in a daily comic strip. The trick, I believe, is in the timing and complexity: Not too many days for each story segment, and not too much action; else we get lost in details or forgot the other story. Keep your scorecards at the ready!

So we take a well-earned break from Mark’s chaotic and absurd contretemps and finally get a second dose of Dad…er…Doc Davis, clearly worried that Cherry may go off half-cocked and make things worse.

One thing you can say about the Davis daughters is that they are not wilting flowers or demur debutantes. Will Cherry go in loaded for bear, like some kind of Michelle Yeoh protégé and try to kick the Association members into submission? Or will she adopt more of a Dread Pirate Roberts (The Princess Bride) approach and beat them in a test of wits and logic?

Cherry’s short-fuse personality is an interesting contrast with Mark’s slow-to-boil attitude. Not that the previous incarnation of Cherry was a pushover; but she operated within the constraints of the moral universe that guided the strip then. Nevertheless, living more or less independently in Lost Forest (as Mark was often on assignment), I have to believe the old Cherry would have developed a good degree of self-resilience and toughness and acted a bit more like this Cherry, given the freedom. (Rats! I just broke my rule against looking back.)

As for the alliterative and redundantly-named neighborhood association, Doc has it nailed in one:  It does look a bit snooty, with its flagstone walkway, ethical front garden, and framed timber cottage architecture. And instead of a normal (that is, déclassé) business sign, there is only an obscure graphic placard hanging over the door, like you would find outside an old European business. Snooty, indeed! It kind of looks like a strange blue wave with the sun to the right. But with that strangely-lined “sky”, the “sun” disc looks more like the center of a camera’s aperture. The kind you see in the beginning of James Bond films. Uh-oh!