Well, I reckon this is Happy New Year for those of us who can—or are able to—appreciate it. I just hope we do our best to make it more than a feel-good aspiration. Now, what’s going on in Mark Trail today?

Hold on. Something’s missing here. Oh yeah. In standard Mark Trail fashion, details were skipped over, such as Connor’s treatment and the return trip to the De-Bait Lodge. The drive back should have been interesting. But for some unknown reason Mark and Chris have allowed Connor to continue the program.

I think a proofreader at the comic strip syndicate must have gotten Rivera’s text and drawings mixed up. In panel 1 Cliff suggests taking the class on a hike. But they are all wearing backpacks and standing atop a ridge overlooking a valley. Seems to me that they are already hiking (though they appear a tad underdressed)!

Has anybody seen Mark fishing in the last three years? Mark’s closing question yesterday gets fleshed out today:  Men need a way to expose their emotional side, and hiking is a great way to do that. Thanks, Cliff!

Well, really!? When I’m hiking, I’m pretty focused on the hike. There’s no time or energy left over for expressing inner feelings (except if I stumble, in which case I express some choice inner feelings). On the other hand, fishing is a more passive, peaceful activity. It offers a much better opportunity to exchange thoughts and feelings with another angler, all without huffing, puffing, and tripping over exposed tree roots. Sorry, Cliff.

Okay, Rivera had to have some kind of “moral to the story” for this subplot. Yet that doesn’t explain how Mark and Cliff can fix the botched fishing seminar. Maybe when they get back they will find that Duke took matters into his own hands and moved the rest of the class (all two of them) outside along the river, getting them to cast their baited hooks into real water. Maybe they’ll catch enough to hold a class fish fry.

A lot of stuff apparently happened that never made it to print (until now), such as the rebellion of the other students, um, campers. And frankly, none of this makes sense, unless you are writing a story for which you have little or no firsthand knowledge (i.e. fishing and conducting seminars). Except for young children, nobody is going to quit or get the willies because one over-emotional idiot hooked himself. Accidents happen and Mark should have warned his “campers” to expect them when messing with sharp objects. “Afraid to fish”!? One of the students is a park ranger, for goodness’ sake!

A reader might be tempted to believe this is yet another instance of Rivera putting the boot to the machismo mythos. Look, I’m all for shaking up the Mark Trail Apple Cart of conventions, as I have been from the start. However, you don’t have to keep beating the same drum, over and over. Rivera, how about taking just one of Mark’s adventures seriously? See what you can do with that.

Anyway, “No!” Mark is not stating hard questions. For the most part, Mark is not even asking questions. The only question asked (panel 4) does not make any sense. And it’s a non sequitur. Instead, we continue to see an ongoing series of sophomoric, overused puns. So, stop it, Rivera, and get on with the story!

Gosh, it must have been about six or seven hours since they last saw each other at breakfast this morning. I reckon stressful situations can make even unexpected meetups more dramatic, so we can give the goo-goo eyed pair a pass. Still, I’m not sure it’s nice to be in a hospital under almost any situation.

I’m still expecting to hear ranting and lawsuit threats by Saturday.

Continuing with yesterday’s surprise of Cherry and Mark running into each other at the hospital, today’s strip moves from Rom-Com dialog to Support Group blather. I swear, the expressions of Cherry and Mark in panel 1 look like Cherry caught Mark fooling around with somebody else. Her face does not say “glad to see you!” And Mark just looks kind of guilty.

Their jarring images are somewhat mollified in panel 2. Cherry still looks odd, perhaps from the difficulty Rivera had attempting to portray Cherry’s face seen from slightly behind her right shoulder. Tough to draw! Mark shouldn’t look too worried, though. Connor just has a finger fishhook injury, so we shouldn’t have to worry about a doctor coming out to report that the finger had to be amputated.

I’m curious how Mark’s storyline continues after the hospital. The class is in shambles. For some reason, Cliff decided to come along and hold Mark’s hand rather than take over the class so that the other two “campers” won’t have their entire day is ruined.

I don’t expect to see Mark portrayed as the moral, all-knowing, macho hero of old, especially after Rivera’s debut Mark Trail adventure (“Happy Trails”). However, I do expect him to be presented as fully capable when it comes to activities he’s supposed to know something about. But we can exclude the teaching part, for which Mark seems to have little aptitude.

This week, Mark’s Fishing/Survival Camp imploded, in large part through allowing Connor’s ranting and self-inflicted accidents to distract Mark and throw the class into chaos. One should wonder why this unstable person was even allowed to take this class, except that Connor admitted his friends on the De-Bait Team talked him into it! Doesn’t say much for them, does it? Then there is the fact that Cliff happened to be absent for most of the class, leaving Mark to handle everything. Since Cliff was aware that Connor had issues, one would think that he would be on hand to watch over Connor and help out.

But the story is not over, as the week ended with Mark and Cliff bundling Connor into a car to rush him to the ER to remove a fishhook from (I think) his thumb. Don’t you think Cliff’s fishing lodge should have had a first aid kit on hand and the expertise to deal with injuries such as this? Could this be something that Rivera did not think of, or does she just want to make Mark and Cliff look like bumbling fools?

Evolution is an interesting—if difficult—topic to try and encapsulate into a Sunday strip. I don’t even play an evolutionary biologist on TV, so not a lot I can say about the topic. But I did find a lot of Mark’s information in a PBS NewsHour release (Search for “PBS naked lizard”).

Art Dept. In Rivera’s customized title panel, I’m surprised she didn’t design the “Mark Trail” name using reptile scat, since it fits the lizard theme.

So, this is survival training!? Rivera portrays this scene as Amateur Hour with a hint of panic. Is she deliberately trying to make Mark look incompetent and unprepared? Mark and Cliff better lawyer-up and prepare for a civil lawsuit. Connor doesn’t seem like the forgive-and-forget type.

In reality, people who go fishing sooner or later experience this painful accident and learn how to deal with it. Getting impaled by a fishing hook is painful, but not usually fatal. You’d think even Ranger Shaw would know that.

There is naturally a possibility of infection or even tetanus. But if you were in the wilderness, you’d have to make do until you got to a doctor or hospital. Sorry Mark, you and Cliff blew an important teaching opportunity and forgot the underlying reason for your retreat.

I think I’m repeating myself here:  Do you think Rivera has become preoccupied with gags?

Early on in Rivera’s tenure, gag panels were an occasional diversion from the straight continuity of the stories. However, rather than emphasizing a point of interest in the last panel to encourage following the story, Rivera seems to be stuck on pushing punchlines over plots. But why?

From day to day, the panels lead inexorably to the closing gag panel, without fostering compelling content or reader motivation, unless you like the gags. I think it is wasted opportunity. Mark’s Big Idea for a survival camp was reduced to a fishing seminar. Why? It wasn’t explained.

A survival training camp story has many opportunities for adventure and even danger. Instead, we get a watered-down fishing class held indoors.

Even this sorry storyline has been sidetracked by the ongoing Mark v. Connor grudge match, pushing aside the other characters and any hope of an adventure. But one thing is clear: Mark is a lousy instructor.

While Rivera continues to draw American (not European) robins, we rejoin Mark as he begins another lesson doomed to failure: Baiting a hook. And once again, Cliff has apparently abandoned Mark to his fate. That’s not surprising, given how Mark callously dissed him yesterday.

I hope that Rivera is giving Eli and Ranger Shaw some meaningful participation at some point in this story. As it now stands, all we have is a repetition of remark-and-insult vignettes. At some point (soon, I hope), something has to go “BOOM!” If the red coloring behind Connor in panel 4 is any indication, Mark better not turn his back on him. Mark may even come to realize that perhaps it wasn’t just the crazy survival book that caused Connor to have a breakdown in the woods.

If I was Mark, I’d toss Connor out and focus on Eli; he’s the only one who genuinely wants to be there and learn how to fish.

This so-called survival school story has devolved into a weird morality play, where Mark plays a macho-man who eats raw meat and talks with his hands, only to eventually fail through his own arrogance. This is the kind of character that the prior Mark Trail would normally enjoy taking down. But I’m not sure what Rivera’s motivation is. Frankly, this does not seem in character, even for the Rivera-era Mark Trail.

Unless Mark, not knowing how to teach, is channeling a TV persona of what he thinks guys want to see in a fishing instructor.

Mark immediately contradicts himself by talking things out. How planned with this class? Perhaps Mark should have shared his fishing philosophy with the students at the start of the class to avoid misunderstandings.

Art Dept. Cliff’s fishing lodge must be doing gangbuster business, as it has dramatically expanded in size, compared to its original depiction. But that might be an invalid comparison, just as were my futile attempts earlier to reconcile the various depictions of Mark and Cherry’s cabin. Perhaps we have to grant artistic expression, where props are used and modified—as needed—to fit the scene. The modest structure we see in the panel from 2021 would  be swallowed up in the view portrayed above, where “fishing lodge on the river” is the obvious intention. Or, it could just be that these distinctions are not so important to Rivera.

I’ve noticed that Viewership and Visitor stats are down for the site. While there are no reasons provided for the reductions, it could be any of several things: a) the posts are too boring; b) they are too long; c) people gave up on the comic strip; or d) all of the above. In addition, I’ve been told that I write too much. I reckon yesterday was one of those days. But I don’t want this to simply be another Mark Trail “snark site” posting one or two biting remarks a day. So, I’ll start by trying to tighten up the prose. I can see that I’m already headed for trouble.

Rivera thankfully spared us from viewing the graphic depiction of tangled fishing line being removed from Connor’s hands. Cliff showed up in time with coffee so Mark can ponder why things are going wrong. He apparently doesn’t understand grammar very well, as he uses “they” and “these guys” when it was only Connor giving him grief. I think Cliff sees through Mark’s lament and suggests the hike to give Mark time to get himself sorted out. Panel 4 suggests he hasn’t figure that out yet. Thoughts?

Okay, where the heck is Cliff? He should be here helping out, especially when his good buddy, Connor, is having a meltdown. So why would Rivera drop Cliff from this story just after introducing him? Perhaps he is outside, prepping bait and boats.

I suppose there are people who somehow are able to get their hands completely wrapped up in fishing line, even when the line is clearly still looped through the pole. That takes a special skill! But I think the court is still out on whether Connor has PTSD or is just a PITA. Or both. It’s not surprising he has relationship problems. I can’t sympathize too much with Mark’s frustration:  He brought this largely on himself. He also agreed to provide relationship advice to the guys, even though he has no professional experience. And—I presume—he approved of Connor’s participation.

Art Dept. Did you all notice that sometimes Rivera recognizes that light and dark exist, and that objects and figures have volume? Check out panel 3, where Mark and his shirt are cast in shadow. But this isolated, cool bit of three-dimensional illusion only makes the rest of the figures look flatter and starker.

For those coming in late, panel 1 illustrates the second view of a fish (trout, perhaps?), as first discussed this past Wednesday. And as usual, Rivera mocks the image with her Batman TV Show sound effect.

Faced with the obvious, we have to wonder why the De-Bait Team members call Connor a friend. He certainly acts self-absorbed, irrational, and paranoid. Perhaps it will come out that he is also a vet and suffers from PTSD. We’ll see how this develops. That reminds me, just where did Mark’s best friend, Cliff, run off to?

I’m guessing you might be as puzzled as I am as to what those ovals are beneath Connor’s eyes in panel 4. I’ve seen Rivera draw them on other faces before, but I have no idea what they are supposed to represent. Any ideas, people? They’re certainly not Roger McGuinn’s granny glasses.

Great, we’re done with introductions. Time to fish. For an instructor, Mark doesn’t seem very practical. The last place you want to teach people how to cast a fishing line is inside a building, especially when you have a river just outside! It’s like teaching somebody how to swim while in the desert. C’mon, Mark! You can’t be that dense! I suppose the real question is (see how I avoided the obvious pun?) “Why the heck is Rivera making Mark look like a dope?”

If practicing to cast is the joke-of-the-day, the usual joke clichés are sinkers flying through windows, lamps breaking, and Mark getting pelted by errant casts (it would serve him right, too!). A snarled line is also a valid punch line, but it’s underwhelmingly illustrated here, barely discernable.

Art Dept. Speaking of drawing, the first two panels are well composed, and Mark is nicely drawn (panel 2). But the artwork starts going off the rails in panel 3 with its lopsided perspective and odd proportions. By panel 4, Mark appears to be having a frontal cranial implosion, though it might be justified.

Okay, so this is now a fishing retreat. What happened to the forest survival idea? I reckon that it must have been abandoned as too grandiose. But we’re backtracking:  Mark already introduced himself yesterday, along with his now absent BFF, Cliff.

It makes sense that Connor signed up for the retreat, but Holy Moly! Apparently, gratitude is not part of his repertoire of social skills. No wonder he has relationship problems.

But I like the fact that the participants all get matching fishing vests, like a uniform. It’s a simple way to create a sense of belonging, right? Did Mark think of that idea or was it maybe Naomi, the female member of the De-Bait Team, who is otherwise not a visible part of this retreat?

Art Dept. I don’t know about you, but I wish Rivera would quit drawing posed, taxidermist animals in the foreground, as if they are some kind of long-running gag of the strip’s tradition for depicting wildlife.