I’m not even going to pretend to understand the disconnected aphorism in panel 3.

However, I admit that I like the way Rivera connected the ground line in panel 2 with the halfpipe curve in panel 3 to create some visual continuity.  The continuous line is not a revolutionary device, itself, but a subtle way to reinforce Rusty’s viewing in panel 2 to what he sees in panel 3:  So, we see the skateboarder through Rusty’s eyes. Except that, Rusty is in the background of panel 3. Rats! That theory is DOA.

And that’s why I wound up doing this blog instead of teaching art history classes.

Okay, why have we spent all week on this pointless back-and-forth questioning between Mark and Dad? Did Rivera recently re-watch the Da Vinci Code? Is it simply to make a transition into next week’s focus on Cherry and/or Rusty? Seems a bit much for that to me. As I’ve pointed out before, none of this is news and it all goes back to their conversation in Florida. I think we have to chalk this up to padding the ol’ storyline, something that we’ve seen in Vintage Mark Trail stories, as well. Like the flapjacks Dad brought up this past Tuesday, we can give Rivera points for keeping another old tradition going!

Also, we haven’t heard much from ol’ Doc Davis for some time. In fact, we’ve hardly heard from him at all since Rivera took over. >DING! DING! DING!<  Rivera tops off flapjacks and story padding with yet another Vintage Mark Trail tradition for the Hat Trick. Rivera is hot this week!

But no points for Doc. Nobody in their right mind makes chili in a pressure cooker.

Rivera continues to pour on the cynicism with these industrial green walls. Meanwhile, a pointless conversation ensues, as Mark describes the very reason why nobody is going to buy anything at this farce of an event; except maybe the naivest. Crypto currency and NFT markets are way down. Crypto Influences are the last people I would expect to con, since they are already part of the Crypto World.

Still, I reckon some of them might look at this like a stockbroker who buys in a slump, believing the stocks will eventually rise and pay off. But let’s face it:  The point of this adventure is to trash NFTs, block chains, and crypto currency; not to praise them. So there is clearly going to be a big hubbub.

Speaking of which, what is the pedigree of the NFTS that the Douche Brothers (as Rivera refers to them in interviews) are hawking? If it’s the crap that Cricket Bro was photographing a while ago, then I think we’ll have our casus belli for a possible riot. And let’s not overlook Professor Bee Sharp, who will be sure to offer up a stinging rebuke of the Brothers and their operation. Ladies and Gentlemen, have your drivers keep their cars running for a likely early and quick exit.

Artistically (to borrow a term), Rivera’s work seems to be shape-shifting. Based on what I wrote yesterday, I’ll take the strip on its own terms for now, though I am at a loss how to explain panel 4, where Happy Trail looks like his head is going through some kind of spatial distortion field. What happened to the lower half of the face, for goodness sakes? At first, the disconnect between the head and the mouth reminded me of that old quasi-animated TV cartoon show “Clutch Cargo”, which surrealistically featured human lips superimposed over the faces, to save on animation costs. The effect was quite amazing and eerie. You can find examples on Youtube (example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEHsXKMtDzw). The panel 4 face of Happy Trail could double as a Dick Tracy villain: “SmudgeFace” or something like that.

But look:  Even the radiance lines (panel 4) that Rivera likes to use around figures look weak and varies from her usual approach. Here is an example from a few days ago: Okay, I’m just pulling up examples and making some comparisons. I could be off-base.

But I don’t get why Happy is still acting clueless (like son, like father?) about the NFT thing, when Mark explained it do him back in Florida (March 7-11). Maybe ol’ Pop is suffering from dementia?

There was a time, starting back in the 1860s, when the artists we know as “Impressionists” were ridiculed by the traditional art world for their work which was considered childish, brutish, and unartistic. In fact, the Impressionists deliberately violated traditional norms to develop their own artistic visions. In time, these new styles became accepted and popular, influencing many artists for decades to follow. So what?

As much as Rivera’s art has been criticized, her approach is almost certainly a deliberate turning away from the traditional old-school illustrator-style of vintage Mark Trail, just as the stories have moved on (more or less). I think this is obvious. I’ve tried (now and then) to rationalize some of Rivera’s more seemingly erratic work as a possible victim of deadlines. I have no proof either way. Anyway, it is not an issue of whether Rivera can draw in a traditionally acceptable style. Clearly, as I’ve pointed out, she can. The issue for many of us is why does Rivera choose to draw this way?

We find ourselves now in a position similar to those Parisian upholders of the Official (Academic) Style of Art in the 1860s, viewing the new l’art terrible. We are perplexed, angry, and uncertain. I just read a recent article quoting Tea Fougner, an editorial director at KFS, talking about the Mark Trail makeover:

“We realized that to really continue [Ed Dodd’s] mission of bringing natural science to everyone, it was important to make Mark, Cherry and Rusty broadly relatable to today’s audience, and for them to deal not only with current events but with the kinds of issues facing millennial parents and their kids today.”

This may be a bridge too difficult for some of us to cross. KFS and Jules Rivera are targeting a younger segment of society through different storylines and subject matter, using a different aesthetic that seems to align itself more with contemporary alternative comics and Cable TV cartoons than with the traditional style favored by Dodd, Elrod, and Allen. I don’t think there is anything wrong with anybody preferring the traditional Mark Trail; it is what we grew up with. I also think it is worth trying to stick it out for a while longer, to try and understand this different approach Rivera is taking. It would be really helpful if Rivera would explain the motivations and artistic approach she chose for this strip, and possibly even why the style dramatically changed shortly after she started.

Sometimes the artwork just doesn’t make sense. Last week, Rivera seemed more on the ball, more in control. Today, especially, this really does look like somebody else—clearly less talented—took over for the day. Either that, or Jules is having a bad week. I mean, this really does not look like it was drawn by the same person at all.  Even that window in panel 3 looks more like a painting that fell off the wall. Space, proportion, line, and details are all wrong. It’s like comparing the average artwork in the Charlton comics of the 1960s to the artwork in Marvel comics of the same time.

As readers know, I try to not be exclusively or even mostly snarky, especially with regard to the art. But I admit I’ve been having trouble trying to resolve the apparent inconsistent quality and styles in the panels, from one week to the next. A cynic might say Rivera is doing this deliberately, but I can’t see that. Rivera was a professional artist before she took on this strip. It goes against common sense for an artist to deliberately sabotage her own art or reputation. Again, it’s not like she doesn’t know how to draw. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary, even in the banner illustration of this blog site (though the illustration is a bit stretched to fit across the screen, I’m afraid). But this is about as bad as I’ve seen. Is somebody else ghosting the panels? That has to be the case!

Regarding the story, itself, I didn’t see Dad complaining about Mark working on vacation when he had to depend on Mark to save him and the lumber mill workers! Anyway, shouldn’t Dad already be aware of Mark’s research, since it was back at Dad’s house that Mark first expressed his displeasure and suspicions about Dad’s business relationship with the Crypto Brothers. Instead, Happy should be asking “Okay, son. Am I in the clear or do I need to get an attorney?”

Did Mark bring all of Dad’s business records with him? Or maybe this is Dad’s laptop. Whatever, Mark is a bit naïve if he thinks a manual scan of records is enough to clear his Dad. When did Mark become an expert on legal business contracts? I think a forensic dive carried out by a professional would be a better idea. But time is short, so Mark takes it on himself to perform the analysis. Will a granola bar endorsement be limited enough to keep Dad in in the clear? Why don’t we ask the talking beaver!?

Readers of the new Mark Trail will remember how Mark used to have conversations with a snake and, on occasion, other animals.  These two-way chats have not been seen in the strip for a long time. Now it is different:  Having animals talk on their own without a human interactor is a new twist; and I think it is a mistake.

Conversations with animals gave Mark a kind of psychological outlet to think things through. Did he actually have conversations, or was it just a psychosis? The ambiguity was a nice hook. But this is wrong-headed, as it presents—as factual—talking animals. But this is not Get Fuzzy or Pearls Before Swine.

Finally, some actual meat on this bone of a story! The moral dilemma we brought up earlier has come to light after all.  And it’s a doozy! Mark had an opportunity to do something earlier, instead of taking field trips and rescuing lumber mill workers. In fact, he could have also let Dad and his partner back in Florida work this out, while he went on his family vacation. But no. Mark couldn’t let it go.

Not only has Mark derailed the family vacation, but he is now in the unenviable position of watching his Dad possibly go down with the Crypto Brothers. Can Mark even stop Professor Bee Sharp at this point? Should he? One wrinkle is that Dad seemed okay with the business arrangement, in spite of Mark’s earlier warnings and protests.

Still, Mark’s only play is to somehow derail the business relationship and kill the event before it takes place. And there is so little time left. This looks like a case for the Impossible Missions Force.

A cartoonist might summarize a Friday (or Saturday) strip on Monday to catch people up. It is unusual to see a recap of what was published just the day before! Still, the revenge angle was not hard to predict.

So, why is Professor Sharp wearing that dark blue (or is it black with blue highlights?) hobbit robe instead of his usual white lab coat with yellow interior lining? It can’t be to blend into a green forest. Anyway, Mark might take a hint and change his own attire once in a while. Phew!

Well, the ball is back in Mark’s court. What will he do with it?

Once again, we see Mark placed in a storyline where he is plainly out of his depth, as well as his area of expertise. As we know, Mark is here is because his father got involved. As in his original confrontation with Cricket Bro and Professor Sharp, Trail is again an unwilling participant. Yet we haven’t seen much intervention on Mark’s part to get Dad away from this train wreck.

We saw earlier (during the Zebra Mussels story) how Cricket Bro tried to enlist Professor Sharp into his NFT enterprise, but it wound up biting him in the ass. This time, Sharp and Trail seem to have a similar goal, even if they are not on the same side. It could just be Sharp looking for revenge against Cricket Bro for getting scammed. But will Professor Sharp’s thirst for revenge also take down Happy Trail?

For Mark, his chief goal now should be extricating his dad, legally, before lawsuits start flying and the Feds show up. I don’t think Mark’s Flying Fists O’ Justice are going to be of much use here, so I hope he knows some good lawyers.

“Gah!” is right (to acknowledge Dilbert), we didn’t wind up with a new nemesis or protagonist. I was hoping at least for Cherry. But no, it’s just another recycled opponent to push Mark’s buttons (which are probably getting pretty worn down by now). This is like the old Batman TV series, where he seemed to just fight the same five or six master villains. Over and over again. Now, Professor Sharp mentioned this “event” thing, too. (Doesn’t he have a class to teach some place?)

Oh, I remember now:  They are talking about the “big crypto influencer event” that the Crypto Bros are putting on (see the April 4 strip). That explains the half-pipe, as well. I reckon guests can roast marshmallows over the coals of the surrounding forest fire.

On the other hand, Mark certainly needs to have a talk with Cherry about those bicep pix, which might explain why he was sleeping by himself.

Talk about disconnects:  

• Mark mutters about drilling, when all we’ve seen and heard is hammering.
• People are building a skate-board halfpipe and Mark is upset that nobody told him about it.
• The forest is still burning.
• Mark mentions an event that hasn’t even been brought up before. What event!?
• We see and hear a mysterious figure that suddenly appears behind Mark.
• And we experience Mark’s now-typical over-reaction.

Put all this together and what do we get?

I’ve no idea! But at least the art looks more carefully designed today.

The quality of absurdity in writing is difficult to grasp, especially when you do not expect or look for it. Vintage Mark Trail stories sometimes had a sense of the absurd about them, though it was usually an unintended byproduct of odd storylines and hokey dialog. Rivera seems to deliberately make absurdity a central part of her stories; not just specific scenarios, such as the one today, but entire plotlines.

There are authors, from Cervantes through Kafka, Hunter Thompson, A. Lee Martinez, and Carl Hiaasen, who write absurdity as a professional chef creates tasty dishes. By comparison, Rivera is a working apprentice. But she is in good company and early in her profession. And those writers did not work within the confines of a daily comic strip. Dashiell Hammet did, for a short time.

Rivera’s use of absurdity is not based on literary satire, arcane existential philosophies, or quasi-religious experiences, as we sometimes see in the authors mentioned above, but in the more mundane madness of daily life, where unexpected weirdness interacts with everyday expectations. Thus, a skateboard ramp gets constructed in a forest area with no explanation, at the crack of dawn. Still, there has to be more than just odd characters and contrived situations. Rivera could cut back some on the weirdness and work on stronger storylines. Nevertheless, we could hardly admit that the storylines offered by Allen, Elrod, or Dodd were much better.

Speaking of which, I suspect James Allen had a taste for the absurd, which he injected from time to time. The clown train story (Feb-Mar 2018), the unnecessary bat-cave pursuit, and the over-the-top Pacific Island catastrophe come to mind.

Anyway, why is Mark sleeping by himself?

What Rivera has been doing since she took on this strip is to consistently run a secondary storyline alongside the main (Mark) storyline. This is one of Rivera’s better contributions to Mark Trail (along with the reduction in exclamation marks!), providing—for a comic strip—a more complex story environment that wants regular viewing to keep things straight. Until this Oregon Vacation story, Cherry has been the chief star of the secondary stories. Now, it is Rusty’s turn to fill the alternate plot. Rivera has kept Rusty’s storyline along what we might expect to see for a pre-teen boy. Little Orphan Annie he is not. But Rusty is trying. So, will Rivera finally let Rusty have more room to grow?

Dept. of Curious Observations:  Panel 1 is a curious image, don’t you think? Aside from a bear cartoon-bombing the scene, we see what appears to be an open door with trees growing directly in front of it, making the doorway inaccessible. I thought that picture on the wall was meant to represent a painting; but now it is clearly a strangely-drawn window in which we see Rusty crafting his plans. The room is clearly lit, yet the adjacent doorway is totally in darkness.

Finally, a tip of the hat to BobS on CK for opining that the SurfSquatch graphic novel that Rusty is reading might have been produced by Cricket Bro’s corporation as an advertising tool. Clever connection!

That has to be one weird looking image in panel 1. Sorry, but it looks to me more like some kind of high school banner left behind after a pep rally.

Rivera proves to be thrifty with her tropes, as she has gotten a lot of mileage out of crickets as land shrimp. It was that remark that Rusty (back in March 2021) caught on a video with Mark and posted online that led to Mark’s California trip and everything that’s followed. So it has come full circle, so to speak.

And Rivera repeats her oft-used image balloon comparing a shrimp and a cricket. Rivera uses this visualization frequently, as regular readers know, though I’m not sure what the real purpose is.

Is Rivera just riffing off her meme here for the humor aspect, or is she trying to draw out some larger issue or symbolism? How did Rusty make the link between crickets and shrimp? Is it simply because SurfSquatch is now some kind of nautical creature who apparently gets his meal from the ocean?

The suspense is palpable. Perhaps the creature will be saved by the Seaside Specter. If the squatch survives on seafood, why would it think to search the forest for its kind? I reckon logic is not a strong part of its mental processes. Wait a minute, it started out as a surfer, right? Never mind.

So, where is this plotline heading? “The Saturday strip” is not an acceptable answer.

At least Rusty’s pajamas are not decorated with cowboys or clowns, but his aversion to relationships with girls indicates he is probably even younger than the vintage Rusty was, though not by much. This explains why he still likes sleepovers, rather than chasing girls.

As for this cryptid tale, it brings up questions:  If it is the case that a normal surfer dude somehow transmogrified into the SurfSquatch, where did the female SurfSquatch come from? Did she also start out as a surfer babe who hit the Big Wave the wrong way and came out as a SurfSquatch? Or is she some other kind of cryptid? Can cryptids of different species have sex? Is Rusty’s book even up-to-date on contemporary gender roles, so that “his beloved mate” has her own entry in the book?

Finally, what does SurfSquatch do in the daytime? Is he a bagboy at Whole Foods? A barista at Café Reina?

I have to say that the criteria for becoming a bona-fide cryptid look pretty weak:  “One day an otherwise normal shoe salesperson sat down in the store’s breakroom to eat an unripe banana. Walking back through the stockroom, the salesperson suddenly transformed into BananaFoot. Its appearance in the store caused customers to suddenly start slipping on the floor and twisting ankles. After that, customers started slipping on floors in shoe stores across the country and began posting about a secret government BananaFoot conspiracy to coerce people into buying expensive high-top shoes with ankle support.”  

By the way, after composing the paragraph above, I suddenly realized the surfboard in panel 2 apparently turned into what looks like a banana in panel 3. Now, is that a subliminal influence or what!? While I don’t get the connection of a banana to Surfsquatch, I did not consciously notice that change when I wrote the first paragraph. Anyway, I decided to not change it.

So, what will develop out of this Rusty Interlude? Does it mean he’ll finally return to his cryptid hunt? Perhaps Rusty will team up with Professor Bee Sharp, to the further indignation of Mark. Regardless, let’s get this hunt back on the road!

So, all of the following happened over the course of a single day!?

• Cherry and Rusty took the light rail into downtown Portland and spent “the day” sightseeing, including lunch and visiting a bookstore.
• Meanwhile, “the four men” (including Happy Trail) drove to an animal rescue site funded, in small part, by the two brothers.
• While there, they received word that the lumber mill was on fire.
• They made their way to the lumber mill, or at least, to a bluff overlooking the site.
• Somewhere along the line, Happy got separated from Mark, Bro #1 and Bro #2.
• Happy apparently texted Cherry about this unfolding crisis (perhaps in the drive over to the fire), which caused her and Rusty to leave Portland and return.
• Meanwhile, Mark got disgusted with the brothers’ inability to do anything, so he ran down the hill to “save the workers”, only to disdover Dad has somehow beaten him down there and is up in a tower.
• Powerlines came down and lay across the grounds, blocking some employees from escaping.
• Mark climbed the tower to get Dad down. But they determine that the power to the lines can be turned off if Mark makes it to the power station through the fire.
• Of course, Mark found it, turned the power off, and saved the employees (and Dad).
• Everybody loves Mark. Even Cherry somehow showed up for the post-crisis celebration.
• Wood mill employees complained to Mark about poor and dangerous working conditions.
• And now it is dark, with Rusty all alone, reading the magazine he bought in the bookstore.
• A bear walks by Rusty’s bedroom. Will the bear test Mark’s Sunday thesis that most monster sightings are just normal animals, such as bears, not being seen clearly?

Well, I have to agree. This certainly has been a long day!

So, is Rivera building the case that Mark Trail suspects Pappy Happy of suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s, making Mark feel it necessary to butt into his dad’s affairs to protect him? Or maybe Mark thinks his dad is just the gullible type that takes people at their word? Then again, Happy did make a business agreement with those two losers, so he might have a point. Dad deserves to get a little bruised.

In other news, looks like the applause has quieted down, this being the Saturday installment. Mark’s rescue has already passed into local history and legend. Is it time to move on?

Where do we go from here? The Trailverse sometimes works in mysterious ways. Maybe Rusty’s Seaside Specter started the fire to chase people away. That’s a classic “monster” kind of thing to do. And that could be a great way to bring the Trail family together again, for a really special vacation.