As we continue to confuse the Sunday installments with the dailies…

… I would love to know what the pink, flesh-colored creature is…

Although I will say that this is better than looking at Mark, Gabe or Corina, which is all we’ve been subjected to for months…  But what does the symbolism mean?  The soaring hawk indicates that Mark maybe floating on the surface… the Lantern Fish suggests that he has sunken to the very depths of the ocean.  But of course we started in the desert of West Texas, so which ocean are we talking about here?  How far have they walked??

In the Dodd/Elrod era, every daily strip had a picture of a wilderness creature- a bit of wildlife.  James Allen has gotten away from that, so I guess we get a triple dose today!!

Hold your breath(s) everyone!!

We do get to see what Gabe and Carina are talking about… and wonder of wonders, they are talking about their own imminent deaths!  C’mon, guys…? Seriously?  You are going go where the Trail goes?  At your own risk of course…  And what is Gabe  doing with his hands in panel one?  is he wringing them?  Or is that his left hand about to unfurl a dramatic gesture? (for which he has become known…)

I really feel for Carina.  She doesn’t get rendered the same way twice. Constantly shape shifting from ‘hot’ to ‘not’… Definitely ‘not’ today.  Her left eye seems to be wandering a bit…

OK Kids, in you go.  Meanwhile, it looks like we’ll all have to hold our collective breath ’til Monday to find out what happened to Mark!!

…to hear what Gabe and Carina are saying…  uncomfortable silence, perhaps?  Gabe declaring his undying affection for Carina?  His hopes and dreams, all shot?  No chance to be the keynote speaker at the next White-nosed Bat symposium?  Carina standing there, hearing Gabe as only Charlie Brown heard his teacher carp at him?

How ironic, though, that the last frame, fraction of a frame, is all dark… which is probably what we should have been seeing for the last 4 months as our crew stumbled through the cave without any lamps or lanterns to guide them… But Mark?  Done for?? Oh say it isn’t so!  There must be a pocket of air somewhere!  Or use your magic fish breathing gill powers!  Or maybe find a fish and do mouth-to-mouth… ok, ewww…  Whatever.  Let’s get this over with, shall we??

While Mark uses up what little oxygen he has left, let’s consider dates…

Today is 6-16-16.  Not quite as momentous as 1-1-01, 2-2-02, 3-3-03… on up to 12-12-12, but it will have to do, since we won’t have another “pure run”  until 1-1-2101, which is 85 years from now… and who knows who will be steering the ship of Trail-state at that point… whether we will still have things like comics… All I know is that I’d be 140 years old, which is highly unlikely.  My kids would be centenarians, which, who knows, may be commonplace for that generation…  We might actually find a fountain of youth and other planets with vast resources over which to claim dominion.

I remember being in New York City on 8-8-88 (that would be in the 20th century, boys and girls… which certainly ages me…) but no clue what I was doing on 9-9-99, although Google tells me that it was a Thursday which probably means I was on an airplane heading home after a week of selling consulting services.

So, however you are spending your days (remaining or otherwise) on earth, please remember that they are limited.  Time is something we don’t get to replace…  it is a non-renewable resource, and the amount which we are given is not known.  Live, Love, and never look back.  Make today and the rest of your days better than all that have gone before.

…you’ll get spat out at some point- lifeless and useless, but you’ll be found.

And, oh, by the way, it was Gabe who mentioned the Current, not Carina, but hey, who’s keeping track anyway??

Prediction:  Mark gets sucked through the aforementioned and anticipated “hole,” pops to the surface, takes a great big breath, looks around and sees that he’s in the middle of a large village…  The villagers all look at him as the second coming of the conquistadors, bearing promises and smallpox, and kill him on the spot…

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the existential Mark… I yam what I yam…  “If I go to my watery grave, well, then, you will no longer have me to look to… or to blame for that matter…” he seems to be saying…

So, as Gabe boards the “faith train” (faith in what exactly?  a good to great outcome??)  he tries to bring Mark back from the cliffs of insanity…

No, staying here is CERTAINLY not the answer, nor is staying here looking at your insipid faces an option either!  Especially that Carina… God knows when she’ll flick her tongue at me again!!

So… last we heard, James Allen was going to get us out of this subterranean paradise and on to something a bit more interesting…  I guess we’ll have to wait until Mark drowns himself (or not…)

I’m sure that there’s plenty of “natural”light to guide the way, and zero chance of anything going badly… Mark’s brand of “faith,” driven by, among other things, the fact that we is perpetually 33 years old, should provide plenty of cover when it comes to a perilous situation like this…

And Carina, Mark is not going to “Wait” any more than you obeyed his request, the maneuver that sent you down the face of the waterfall…  But what Mark really needs is Batman’s utility belt!  There he would find an underwater breathing apparatus- the “Re-breather” along with a long cable with a hook  on the end that could be used to maroon himself under water…

Sorry Campers,  I was away a couple of days… the suspense of not knowing how little progress was being made was about driving me crazy!

Well, I see now that almost no progress has been made, other than to conjure up a few hackneyed expressions while applying some stilted dialogue…  Yea, Mark, what IF the hole is only a foot in diameter, huh? Huh??

I am nigh on speechless here…  this is where the plot leads us?  To a hole in a wall that can’t be seen but must be there because the flowing, rushing water is not filling up the cave?  Sort of like a Black Hole in Space that cannot be seen but we know is there because of its effect on visible things around it?

Go for it, Mark… you are probably right.  There’s nothing else to be done at this point…

Carina really has a death wish doesn’t she?  Let’s go underwater, see the hole in the wall where the water is escaping, (how, pray tell, with no light…) swim into it (underwater) and see where it goes, all with the current, which will make it impossible to return from whence we came when it’s clear that this move leads nowhere…

But remember!  Mark, “Full of faith” and “This strip is named for me” and “I’m James Allen’s meal-ticket” Trail hasn’t lost hope here…  and Carina I guess is rising to the bait.  So stay there, Gabe, molder and rot and become cave-food while Mark and Carina fulfill their destiny!

Yes, the water has run into a wall- a “dead end” as Gabe would put it…  sort of like this story line.  But remember kids, it’s always darkest right before the dawn… (is it, really?)

“It’s always darkest before the dawn” is like asking “How far can you run into the woods?” The answer is “half way”, because then you are no longer running into the woods (you’re running out). It is always darkest before the dawn, because the first moment it begins to get brighter, is by definition, the beginning of dawn (though it may be several hours before full daylight). Unfortunately, the aphorism doesn’t tell us how dark it will be before things turn around.

So let’s hope (or not) that this is not the literal end of the line… otherwise the water is going to fill up the cave and everyone drowns… or maybe that is the end.  Quick cut to Cherry, “I wonder why Mark hasn’t called… it’s not like him” (at least under the Allen Regime…)

And a shout out to faithful reader Terry who just offered, through comments, a link to a letter by Mr. Allen himself, in response to a Letter to the Editor of The Washington Post:

“You may have seen this already (letter to the editor of the Washington Post by James Allen, but if not, then here it is:”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/some-people-dont-appreciate-mark-trail-making-it-is-a-childhood-dream-come-true/2016/06/03/1625a07e-2755-11e6-8329-6104954928d2_story.html?tid=hybrid_collaborative_1_na

…be sure to follow the link to the original letter that lambastes the current state of the strip, especially the story line…

But bravo, Jim.  I know I spend every morning with coffee in hand looking for ways to “comment” on what I refer to as “The Trailverse,” or “the Verse” for short… And I have, on balance, been fairly negative of late, with the extremely long journey to the center of the earth…  But I think I also understand how difficult it is to keep this kind of thing moving along…  I guess we wouldn’t be shouting out if we didn’t deep down care for Mark Trail and what you bring…  keep swinging- you’ll find your groove…

Last time I checked this was a family strip…  I dare not even comment on today’s rendering of Carina, as Mark looks away in disgust and horror… and reluctantly answers her comment.  Have you no shame, girl?

Hard to tell in the background what Gabe is doing or what direction he is heading… sort of hunched over in simian form, is he leading? Is he bringing up the rear?

A crashing sound you say?  almost like surf?  Maybe they have walked all the way to the Gulf of California and the Baja Peninsula…

“My face is melting!!” shouted Carina as Mark lays on two of his best, most tried and true clip-art looks… Mark “has faith…” Ladies and Gentlemen…  Well Hallelujah, Brothers and Sisters, Mark has done found his-self some sal-vation…

Well, they had better get themselves out of that cave system…  we need to find out what’s going on with Jose and Jefe… remember them?  the coyotes?  Making a killing trafficking humans north to Trump-land?  OK, I know that’s a potentially unsettling thought…   but these three need to re-join the World of the Sun in order to find out what is going on !

I am at a loss.  I can’t remember the last time that Gabe was featured in three consecutive panels, (and I’m not going to look…) but it’s really off-putting.

So what comes to mind?  A random scene from the classic Planes Trains and Automobiles, when the super up-tight prissy Steve Martin character dresses down the lovable, oafish but affable John Candy character, “When telling a story it always helps if there is a point to it…” Are you listening, James Allen??

It’s hard enough being a girl in the modern world- societal expectations regarding body size and shape… But unless her jeans are full of water, her backside just grew immensely in proportion to the rest of her…  Not to mention reading Mark all wrong these last hours/days/weeks- yes, he’s a happily married many that wants nothing to do with you…

So as Mark keeps his distance from Carina’s marauding tongue, he mentions Gabe… and no sooner does he do that, when Gabe comes schussing down the face of the unexpected and unnamed falls…  Nice that he’s been able to maintain his scream all the way down… what better way to announce your arrival??

…fallin’ down the falls…

I’m not sure whether Gabe is supposed to be the comic foil, a clumsy oaf, or the inveterate cock-blocker…  But there he goes, as if he’s at the main attraction at WaterWorld- where adults take their children to mingle with other children in the roiling, chlorine-infused frappe, doing their best to ignore each other while avoiding eye contact with other people who, like themselves, apparently had nothing better to do…

So with Gabe tumbling over the edge and Mark parrying Carina’s advances, we are left to wonder, once more, where all this goes.  At lease we continue to have good light…

We haven’t seen a good “What th-?” in a long while, and this has to be the first time it’s been prompted by a woman sticking her tongue in Mark’s mouth…  To quote faithful reader Dan P., “There’s nothing romantic about CPR…”  that is until Mark Trail tries to perform it, I guess…

Carina, you are an opportunist, an enchantress, and a hussy!  You staged the entire waterfall-fall/ would-be drowning just so you could get Mark in your arms…  Only to find out that Mark is a “Happily Married” man!  Oh the tragedy!

OK, time check.  They’ve been in the cave what- hours?  maybe a day? And we have suffered now for a total of 4 months?

Sort of like Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus… for “SCUBA.”

I wonder if Mark realizes that the latest CPR method doesn’t involve pressing lips/mouths together…  it’s just a series of rapid chest compressions, 100 per minute,  performed to the beat of the Bee Gees’ 1977 hit Stayin’ Alive…

But boy oh boy… if we didn’t know Mark Trail, we’d swear he was recreating that make love in the sand/surf scene in “From Here to Eternity…”  But Burt Lancaster I guess he’s not.

For those of you paying extra close attention, you will notice that I have been filing my recent entries under the category of “Arachnid Ho!”  Which of course makes no sense and bears little meaning when we consider that the current story arc is all about caves and (supposedly) bats suffering from a dread disease…  but considering how much we have heard about the bats, a category name like “To the Batcave, Robin” wouldn’t have made much sense either…

So in stumbling upon today’s Sunday paper educational  entry, I was amused to find an actual story about spiders, or at least a story about a spider that eats the young of an invasive species who seems to have no other natural predator… although one has to read 2/3 of the way through to get to anything regarding said spider (typical Jamesian style…) But recall here’s what caused me to name the category “Arachnid Ho,” similar to the reason I categorized a story “Crabby Octopus“when the story ended up being more about world domination and terrorism…  but at least with that story we had an actual villain, though he preferred to appear in name only and remain off camera…