It’s good to see that Rusty is not so easily swayed by Mark’s patronizing paternalism. He’s thinking through the situation, even if his premise is questionable. Considering the mask as a possible diversion, for example, is impressive thinking for a pre-teen. Or even a teenager.

How Rusty expects to find answers online is problematic. It’s not likely that actual Vulcans, for example, are going to put up a web site; and the Internet is filled with trolls, conspiracists, and just plain nutters. The main point here is that, from a plot standpoint, Rivera gives us a little more complexity in the storyline. So, there is the possibility that this story will not just quickly descend into another bagatelle of Mark coming across yet another goofball lately escaped from the asylum.

“Be careful what you wish for!” my mother used to tell me. And so, we watch the investigator at work. Looks like I’ll have to eat my wor…<gobble!><gobble!>

Mark seems somewhat over-reactive, like some holier-than-thou parent finding a book by Christopher Hitchens in their child’s bookcase. Perhaps that accounts for the “testifying preacher” pose in panel 4, because Mark does get preachy now and then. I noticed that most of Mark’s dialog has exclamation points (as in the strip’s good ol’ days). This is not something we normally see in Rivera’s interpretation.

If a person is lost in the woods after following Tad Crass’s bad advice, where does the horse head come into the picture? Was it part of the book’s advice to wear a horse head mask in the wilderness to save yourself from animal attacks?

Mark makes flexible use of the word “lost”. In panel 3, it is ambiguous whether Mark refers to getting lost in your mind from reading the bad advice or whether a person got physically lost in the real world after reading the book. In panel 4, a person may have metaphorically “lost their head” as a result of reading the book. That accounts for the contrived pose of holding up the horse head mask. Rivera almost got away with that visual pun. But not quite.

It is even more problematic, since “losing your head” refers to a person acting without reasoning or caution. Perhaps this lost camper is going to turn out to actually be Tad Crass, still living as if it was 20 years ago, yet trying to test out his AI-generated survivalist book.

Through a series of improbable connections (i.e. a horse head mask and some “pink crystals” found by chance at an abandoned campsite) Rusty Holmes … er, … Rusty Trail concludes they were left behind by a former TV star-turned-new-age-survivalist. Rusty may not have the right of it, but he knows how to uncover obscure information.

Still, Mark’s unfounded suspicion of a person in distress seems to be getting more unintended support from Rusty’s research. Will Mark go hunting the next day, only to find a lost, emaciated camper reduced to drinking his own urine because he couldn’t follow a path that Mark and the boys had clearly used?

Art Dept: While we suffer more puns, it’s been clear for some time that depictions of Mark and other people seen from a distance (e.g., panel 3) do not come across well, as if a digital image has been pixilated through reduction.

I would hope that even a youngster like Rusty would know that a mask left in the woods for about 20 years would not be in very good condition. Okay, so it must have been recently left. The pink crystals seem to tie in to Rusty’s Tadd Crass hypothesis, aided by Cherry’s good memory of commercials.

But I have to admit that I have not figured out how Mark connects all of this to the notion of an injured camper. Would the suspicious light then have been some kind of rescue signal? Or maybe some aliens actually did come down during the night (as they always seem to do), kidnapped the camping Tadd Crass (as they always seem to do), and are now probing him and dissecting him for evil reasons (as they also seem to want to do). The alien ship could also have made that curious incision around the campfire.

Or maybe it was just Doc Davis, apparently a fan of that old show, who put all this together to prank his own family for leaving him out of all of the get-togethers.

Rivera does at least try to create a sense of domesticity for Mark, something that we would see to an extent in pre-Rivera Mark Trail, as well. James Allen devoted at least three weeks of strips of Mark being at home and chatting with Cherry about online comics, reader comments, and his dangerous job, before jetting off to Katmandu to help look for the yeti (August-September 2019). With Rivera, Mark’s stays at home tend to be innocuous, self-conscious, and banal (like much of our own lives). Yet . . .

I don’t wish to flog a dead horse head, but do we take it literally that Rusty believes the mask he found is the actual 20-year-old mask from a TV show? I could not recall any “prank” show involving a horse-headed host that used to be on TV. But this sounds like a specific reference. Any ideas, people?

Finally, was Rusty’s alien invasion adventure designed solely to set up today’s pointless 3-panel “joke”? I sure hope not. As storylines go, this is pretty thin soup.

You’d think Mark and Rusty had been away for two weeks, the way they carry on. For goodness sakes, they only spent the day walking through Lost Forest! Now, they’re home. Calling it a “reunion” seems a might inflated. As for the ongoing status of Cherry’s dad, Doc Davis: Maybe he is still at his clinic, working on Sassy’s rash (since she isn’t around here, either).

But tomorrow we might see if Mark is too full of himself (as is usual) to ask Cherry how her day was! That would be a nice segue to combine the stories, since today’s submission doesn’t add much to what we already know.

Looks like everybody got safely home from their respective hunts. The bat in the foreground, on the other hand, is probably looking for that bat house Mark hammered together in Sunday’s installment.

Pushing past the standard panel 3 pun, where do we go from here? This could be the end of Rusty’s mini-adventure and a possible segue into an actual paying assignment for Mark. He has been between jobs for some time, but as a freelance reporter it’s to be expected. I wonder if he wrote up his fishing trip/train corruption adventure to sell to one of his regular magazines. This week could also be a good opportunity for Rivera to keep Cherry’s story fresh in our minds by having her tell Mark and Rusty what’s been going on.

So Jeanette has expanded her pancake menu to include pizza. Well, both foods are round. Perhaps we’ll even get to see injera on the menu before too long. Like pizza, this round Ethiopian bread can function as both a plate and an eating utensil. But I digress.

Mark is still hung up about that abandoned campsite. Why? I mean, isn’t that what you do when you leave:  You abandon it, unless you are one of those who thinks humans are not really a part of nature and should leave no trace of their presence. Unlike other animals. I’m digressing again.

I have the feeling that Rivera has set us (and Rusty) up once again. It might be that Rusty’s failed alien search adventure was simply a plot device to initiate Mark’s upcoming project: The search for the missing camper.

Instead of investing in a longer and more involved storyline, as well as the chance to reveal some more personality in the boys, Rivera appears to be making Mark the hatchet man to kill off the search (and this story) at the first likely opportunity: “Oh, an abandoned campsite, boys? Well, fake alien crash. Time to go. This story is over!”

Did Mark even use his vaunted compass? Did they get waylaid, lost, or confused in their hiking? Who knows? But Mark acts as if he was in charge all along, arrogantly trying to control the situation with his patronizing “father knows best” judgement in panel 4 with Rusty filling in the punch line. And didn’t Rusty and Mark already have pancakes that very morning!? Well, I could be wrong about all this. Today’s strip could just be a setup for a surprise plot twist that shows itself on Saturday. This is the right place and time for one!

The first place the kids find some trash and it automatically becomes the alien crash site? Well, the clearing is shaped like a circle (think flying saucer or alien crop circle)!

While the boys enjoy their alien adventure, Mark finds it very suspicious that a person or persons unknown might have built a campsite and campfire in a clearing. Wow! Who could imagine such a thing!?

Isn’t this the same thing Mark, Happy, Rex Scorpius, and his mother all did when they were on the run from the police? If these mystery campers were anything like them, they’d have to be long gone by now!

Commenter Daniel P proffered an intriguing hypothesis that the design scratched into the ground in yesterday’s strip (panel 4) was a pentagram, suggesting that some kind of pagan ritual (that would include the horse head) could have taken place. But today, it looks more like a diamond to me, with the remains of a campfire in the middle. Not terribly interesting, but the pagan pentagram idea sure sounds a lot more intriguing for this story.
Tip: If you click on any part of the strip, it will automatically zoom in. Click the back button to exit the zoom.

Hmmm, nothing much said about that ground diagram, and that Eastern Mole in panel 1 sure seems to want to get somewhere else (it could wind up as our Sunday subject). But instead of an intriguing or even dangerous adventure, all we’re getting so far is a bunch of juvenile jokes, and not just from the juveniles. I think panel 4 is a record low for Rivera.

Maybe the comics syndicate would have been better off letting Rivera start a “Young Mark Trail” strip where he is just a teen and already getting involved in journalistic investigations and the environment. The type of storytelling and humor Rivera likes to use would more appropriately fit that format. She would probably attract a larger, younger audience, as well. Then somebody else could take this over. Win-Win. Hear that, King Features Syndicate?

So, they must have actually traversed more of Lost Forest than I figured. This might have been one case where a narration box in one of the earlier dailies stating something like “And some hours later…” would have been informative for once, rather than hosting another pointless pun.

Mark’s internal cogitations about the source and point of the mask are helpful, but inconsistent. A prank? Possible! Someone lost? A non sequitur. Better to ask “Was it left behind after a costume party in the woods?”

But a more dramatic hypothesis would be “Perhaps the mask was used in a bank heist and the robbers are nearby!” Yikes! Now that would be a fundamentally more significant and dangerous proposition. We might expect that to be the case in a pre-Rivera Mark Trail adventure. In any event, Mark, better safe than sorry, so turn the kids around and head to the pizza parlor, while you can!

“In [Mark’s] search for an alien crash site…” Uh, just whose search is this? Last I saw, Mark invited himself into this adventure. Jules Rivera seems to once again be taking the boys for granted, as if they are only grist for the mill of Mark’s unending search for glory. To put it even more cynically, Rivera seems bent on trying to trivialize Mark Trail’s purpose and existence. It is both unbecoming and sad.

Okay, then. Taking Rivera’s question literally (panel 1), what else did Mark find that was strange? By my own armchair reckoning, Mark hasn’t found anything, strange or common, because the horsehead mask was found by Robbie! Robbie might be a pain in the ass, but he has the right idea (panel 3):  Keep searching!

Last week Mark remarked (like that pun, Jules!?) that he thought something was going on at this location. Are they going to look around for clues of the alleged mask dropper? And what will they find?

“This hike was a bust.” What a quitter! Ah well, is this another busted adventure? The gang could not have walked very far before finding the horsehead mask. Yet, they somehow thought they needed some kind of GPS or compass to avoid getting lost. This suggests that Lost Forest is not very large or that Rivera decided to omit about four hours of hiking between the Thursday and Friday strips. It begs the question: Shouldn’t they just keep searching? And I agree. Stopping now would be a drag. By the way, this plot has nothing to do with the environment or ecology, right? Whoah! This is the Mark Trail adventure strip. Why can’t Rusty get involved in environmental matters like his parents?

Let’s get to another of the issues, shall we? (I’ll leave you to discover another one.) In panel 4, Mark says “I don’t know, Ernie.” Ernie!? WTH? Mark has been talking to his own son, Rusty! Has Mark spent so little time at home that he forgot what Rusty looks like? We might be able to make that case for the pre-Rivera iteration of Mark Trail. Another possibility is that Mark’s brain is working slowly and is only now reacting to Ernie’s outburst in yesterday’s strip.

Nevertheless, Mark’s lame joke in panel 4 is a clear setup of things to follow. For those of us who might be misled by Rusty’s all-too-easy surrender, Rivera has taped a “To be continued” sign to panel 4.

Maybe the costume horse head came from the prop department of “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” which occasionally trotted out Secretariat, the dancing horse. Just a thought.

Yesterday’s reader commentary noted the suspicious omission of smartphones from the general discussion, in spite of Ernie’s apparent attempt to use a tracking app on his (I’m not sure why I forgot  his name the other day). The more important comment may have been the general dismissal or concern for smartphones in order to justify Mark’s intervention as he arrived to “save the day.” Taking on the role of hero is Mark’s calling, of course. He just can’t stop himself.

In Rivera’s version of Mark Trail, his attempts at heroic posturing often result in minor catastrophe or at least, setbacks. As I noted in the past, I think this is just fine. It makes him more human. In the pre-Rivera iterations, Mark was always just a trifle too righteous, too honorable, and too dang smug. However, many readers (I suspect) consider Mark’s current image has been pushed too far to the other side, making him appear more foolish than just more human. I think Rivera also kept the old “smugness.”

Did you see anything noteworthy in today’s strip?

Apology: Thanks to reader “be ware of eve hill” and Dennis (the blog’s originator) for their help in my finally figuring out why the “Like” button was not showing up (at least for me) on the main page. But I also have to be more careful about my posting technique. Apparently, viewers who are subscribed to this blog (I think there are at least 2 or 3), automatically get notified by email immediately when I post. Ouch! On one recent occasion I accidentally posted but forgot to load the strip on the page. A moment of distraction on my part. If you were especially quick, you might have viewed that post without the strip. I quickly corrected it, but it was embarrassing. I don’t know if you got re-notified. This “not ready for prime time” fiasco could have happened before, as I sometimes have to post my blog “early”, because this site’s “preview” function does not always work. Anyway, I’ll try harder to cut down on these goofs!

Well, at least we’re moving along. Mark trots out some “woodsman” wisdom, for little purpose. Sure, moss grows on the north side, most of the time. Flowers tend to lean towards sunlight, so they may lean south, some of the time. But you better hope it isn’t a snowy winter. Say, weren’t any of these kids ever scouts!?

Again, neither moss nor compass tells you “where you are”, only in what direction you may be heading. Big difference! I reckon that Rivera was never a scout, either. But I suppose if Mark’s main intention is just to make sure they are moving in one direction, then fine. But if you are not counting steps or marking trail (oh, I just made a pun!) as you go, then getting back where you started is not guaranteed. Still, this is just Lost Forest, not the Alaskan Wilderness. If we’ve learned anything, there are lots more people living in it or around it than we thought. Just yell. Somebody will find you. Maybe even Klingons.