Home » Cherry Placeholder

Category Archives: Cherry Placeholder

The Week in Review and the Sunday Nature Chat

Posted on by | 3 Comments

It’s been a quiet week here in Lake Woebegon … uh, skip that. I got sidetracked. It’s recycle week here in Mark Trail. In her attempt to be the Complete Eco Cartoonist, Jules Rivera is recycling one of her earlier stories, rather than cutting down more virgin plotlines. Look, if Rivera can keep recycling opponents, why not stories, as well? Elrod did it, too!

We returned this past week to Lost Forest, where we found Cherry doing spade work at the Sunny Soleil Society. Violet Cheshire approached her with a request. Violet was concerned with strange shrieks coming from the music hall where she plans on holding another music festival sometime soon. They discovered that bats are in the building once again! While Cherry seemed to recall the similar event from a few years ago, it’s not clear that Violet did. In fact, that earlier event was never specifically brought up for discussion. For my own part, I was sure this lead-up was just one of Rivera’s jokes on her readers. I was wrong.

When Cherry investigated the music hall, she discovered that a bat population was housed in the upper area and now contained a bunch of bat parents and their babies. Violet wanted them removed immediately, but Cherry pointed out that the law forbids them doing so until the youngins are capable of going out on their own. This sent Violet into conniptions at the thought she might have to reschedule the concert. Well, it’s a valid concern, especially if Violet has already sent out invitations, printed posters, and uploaded notices on Fakebook and BikBok. But we may have to wait a few weeks to learn more, if Rivera holds to the normal story ratio of two weeks of Mark to one week of Cherry. Perhaps Cherry should approach King Features for her own comic strip!

Mark is going “all in” on caves! But why is Mark standing in front of water? Not all caves have underground streams. Perhaps this is a visual reminder of Cricket Bro’s current illegal cave visit that Mark is about to get sucked into. Good thing Mark has the proper gear!

Say, does Mark buy homes on the side? He reminds me of a billboard I see. (panel 2)

Step Six: Rinse and Repeat

Posted on by | 4 Comments

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.

Blimey, Violet, it ain’t simply babies, it’s rabies, too!

Posted on by

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.

Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! It wasn’t a trick, after all. Darn!

Posted on by

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.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one …

Posted on by | 3 Comments

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.

Seems like old times, again?

Posted on by

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.

Cherry still hasn’t discovered the garden shovel.

Posted on by

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.