Hmmm, I’ve seen more drama in Scoobie-Doo. It’s a shame when you set up a story with promising elements of absurdity (in the literary sense), satire, and even suspense, only to let it all collapse under the weight of missed opportunities and weak execution. Well, the story is still in progress. Will Mark have to return to the clear danger of going back into that “lion’s den“? Is he going to chase that lion back into the house and lock the door to protect the public? Will Mark tell Sammy that the lions are loose?

It seems to me as if Rivera could have set up this portion of the story like a computer adventure game, where the explorer has to work through a series of mysterious rooms and areas, locating treasures and clues, while avoiding dangers along the way. So this could have been genuinely interesting and suspenseful. Yet, it has not come off that way at all.

But, we have just two very obvious “clues” after a less-than thorough search of this mansion.

The decision to have lions inside and outside of the house make no sense, given that the story was originally based on the concept of lions locked inside a house with a movie director and his actors. Nobody wanted to go into the house, not even the movie’s animal wrangler, Sammy Spotter. So Mark was tasked with making the dangerous foray into the mansion. But all of that is blown away. And given the apparently easy access outside, why would lions not be roaming the island, eating the wildlife and attacking tourists?

Art Dept. In spite of the textured coats of the sphinxlike lions, they are not very convincing, especially as they so clearly jar with the flat imagery around them, like a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling of a plain, concrete room.  The artwork seems to get even more illogical. For example, in panel 1, the wall of the house extends below Mark’s right leg, suggesting that Mark is about 12 feet tall. Clearly, that was not intended, but is just careless. The small bush between Mark’s legs is just a too-cute joke.

I’m sorry, Jules, but this is pretty rank stuff, visually and textually.I went over the implausibility of the wind blowing papers from inside the house to the outside when there is no cross-current. Rivera could have just had Mark move to the window in order to better read the paper and then have a gust of wind blow it out of his hands. That would at least be plausible.

And just how do we know that this production schedule is an important clue to the whereabouts of Wingit? In panel 3, the narration box states that Mark has caught up to the paper, yet he is still inside of the house, looking out the window. In panel 4, a recumbent lioness has somehow managed to snag the schedule. How did lions get outside of the house and why are they just hanging around the yard? The notion that police would not get involved in a situation like this is totally unrealistic.

Art Dept. There isn’t much to be said on the positive side and I do not think I need to belabor the obvious. The real question is why Rivera puts out this kind of stuff when it is clear she can do much better. Sure, her syndicate is probably not paying her much money. I get that. Mark Trail is not pulling in the kind of readership and earnings that Garfield or even Luann does, nor even the endless reprints of Peanuts. So, is the lack of quality meant to be some kind of protest by Rivera? Or maybe just her indifference? That seems self-destructive.

Perhaps there is no financial incentive for her to spend more time on the strip. That depends on her contract, of course. It might even be that the syndicate, itself, doesn’t care one way or the other, for its own reasons. I certainly don’t know. It’s a shame, because there are many good ideas and approaches that Rivera has already initiated or could implement.

I’m not sure how much bravery is required to walk through a house filled with docile lions, though the basic idea is certainly unsettling. Anyway, as the story unfolds, Mark looks for more evidence of Wingit’s location. But speaking of evidence, what was on the video camera and where is it?

Mark finds another possible piece of the puzzle: a production schedule, which just happens to suddenly fly out of a surprisingly open window! OMG!! A disaster! Go figure.

Funny though, I hadn’t noticed any strong air currents inside the house that would cause this. Was Mark holding the document outside of the window to read it? Couldn’t he just turn on the room lights or use the flashlight!?

Okay, so the schedule flew out of the window. Big deal. Mark or Sammy Spotter can just go retrieve it, right? Or does there just happen to be a swimming pool that the document just happened to fly into and then just happened to turn into a soggy pile of unreadable paper mush? What will Mark do, then?

At least the house hasn’t caught fire, yet.

Art Dept. Looks like Rivera wasn’t ready to continue employing hatching to suggest darkness, volume, or strike a mood. A lost opportunity!

Well, how interesting! The lions have not only learned how to operate a chest freezer, but they have learned to eat frozen meat. If I was Mark, I’d check if that meat looks like actors. And what happened to the video camera he was looking at yesterday?

Art Dept. The artwork for the lions seems to get more questionable. However, I’m impressed by Mark’s depiction in panel 1, which has some darn good line work and a well-defined expression. Too bad that does not carry through. If only all of the artwork looked that good. However, I am very intrigued that Rivera finally decided to try her hand at introducing shadows on Mark in panel 3. They are not very well integrated into the anatomy, and the effect is too heavy-handed. But, it’s a good start, so I hope she keeps at it and uses it more to define atmosphere, volume, and drama. But don’t ask me about that left hand.

WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON IN THIS STORY?

It is easy for me to  fantasize that this entire story is some kind of con game like Punk’d, where Trail is the designated mark. Allow me to post some observations and hypotheses:

1. Bill Ellis gave Mark a dodgy assignment to find a missing movie director last seen in a house filled with lions. Nobody else is available to do the job. Police can’t handle it. No professional lion tamer or private detective need apply. The assignment specifically requires Mark Trail’s participation, even though he has no qualifications for the assignment and admits to it
2. The location is a “mansion” on an exotic and picturesque island
3. Mark’s contact is a “professional” animal wrangler too afraid to deal with the lions, but declares the untrained Mark Trail can do it. Gullible Mark laps it up
4. There is supposed to be a group of actors sequestered inside the mansion with the lions by the movie director, for the sake of a movie in production, but they are nowhere to be found
5. Mark enters the house and discovers it is filled with inactive lions. He doesn’t seem disturbed by their presence, nor by the lack of actors. Maybe the lions are drugged or just senile.
6. Mark conveniently finds a video camera near the front door, reminiscent of finding the brass lamp in the well house of that great early text adventure game, Colossal Cave
7. Will the video camera provide a series of hints to help Mark locate the movie director? Or maybe it will provide a confession that this entire enterprise is a prank for a new Reality TV show, and Mark is its surprise first guest star!

Rivera takes the easy road to spot Mark for the ongoing bad puns. Well, why not? He’s done it before. I suppose it is logical to think this is director Wesley’s video camera that was left on the floor, as opposed to one of the likewise-missing actors in the house. But did Wingit record himself? Or was he just filming miscellaneous sequences for future use? At least Mark takes the next logical step to view the recording.

Well, I have to say that those lions certainly do look pretty relaxed; the kind of relaxation that comes after a good meal, that is!

Art Dept. One thing that has always puzzled me since Rivera took over the strip is why portions of Mark’s hair (and Cherry’s for that matter) are blue. Is blue the new gray? Does Mark color his hair? This does not resemble any kind of normal highlighting. I do recall seeing this hair convention before in some comic books here and there. Post a comment if you have some information.

I hope you discovered my belated posts for Saturday and Sunday (scroll below), as I accidentally left them in draft.

Yeah, this looks like more story padding going on; but is it? There are some really glaring issues: 1) The action in today’s episode appears to precede the events of this past Saturday, where Mark was shown already inside the house. Check it out. The question here is “WTH!?” This is not a simple “What happened last week” recap. The publish date here clearly shows 09-16 in panel 3.

2) The artwork today is once again clumsy and hurried. Note Sammy Spotter in panel 1: He looks like he was drawn by somebody who didn’t know how anatomy works. Mark’s figure on the steps is not much better, looking more like a Howdy Doody marionette. And he does not have the flashlight Sammy gave him on Friday, but had on Saturday!

3) I also missed the “variable front door” situation. On Thursday and Friday, we saw double-doors with twin side windows. They changed to a single door with full-length sidelights on Saturday. Today, they are back to double-doors but with no side windows or sidelights. This is one freaky, but ugly mansion.

Rivera could probably have used the Continuity checker from Wesley Wingit’s movie set.

This is rich. It’s hard to tell, but it has been daylight. Maybe it’s getting on to dusk, but shadows are rarely cast in the Trailverse. So why does Mark need a flashlight? Did the mansion lose electricity? Are all the shades drawn? I mean, we can still see the outside!

Anyway, what clue is Mark referring to? Does Mark think Wingit left a video of what he was doing or where he went? Why does Mark believe it could be Wingit’s camera or why anybody would have one?

Where to begin. We have a pride of lions just hanging around as if they are at a watering hole in a Kenyan savannah. They don’t seem at all bothered by Mark’s sudden entrance, and Mark doesn’t seem at all bothered by the fact that he can just walk in and kneel down alongside the lionesses. I suppose, if they have eaten all of the actors, they are not looking for snacks.

Mark holds the discovered video camera with the awe of Indiana Jones discovering a Peruvian golden idol. I don’t understand the mystery here. Are the lions tranqed? Maybe Wesley Wingit decided he had enough and took the actors out for dinner or maybe a quick weekender to San Diego.

Or, these are not real lions, but actors in costume, and Wingit is the alpha male on the sofa. That would mean they are part of an experiment to see if they can fool any would-be rescuers. Why? That would be because Wingit wanted to save money by not having to hire real lions for his movie.

I wonder if Rivera thinks this strip comes out once a week, since she uses half of today’s space repeating what was covered yesterday. Perhaps she thinks she is being helpful to elderly Trailheads who still read this strip and who might appreciate the reminder. On the other hand, this reiteration is also a method for padding a story to slow the pace down and help it fill out the week. Perhaps that slick, single-panel-Rusty-drop-off yesterday moved too quickly for an old comic strip like this and it just needs a breather.

Okay, so it looks like the guys did bring along some equipment! But maybe this is more than a simple flashlight. Perhaps it is like the cigarette lighter that Our Man Flint used to carry, the one that had about 98 different tools and functions built into it. In any event, it seems that Sammy Spotter, the intrepid animal wrangler, will not be participating in Mark’s assignment, after all. Maybe Mark will begin wishing he had brought along somebody useful, like Rex Scorpius.

Well, the crisis thermostat is really boiling over now! Or maybe it’s freezing over? Heck, I’m just not sure what Rivera is driving at. Is this a real crisis or not?

Instead of hurrying on to solve this really big deal problem (at least for the movie studio), our intrepid group takes the time to drive out of their way to view some old houses. And now they dawdle by the shore, coddling Rusty.

Perhaps after they spend a few hours hiking around the mountains to find a Catalina fox or shrew, they might find the time to take a detour to the “lion house,” only to learn that the missing movie director snuck away to the Bahamas with one of his “production” assistants.

I’m still trying to come to grips with the justification for this entire storyline. One would think that a house filled with free-roaming lions and human actors would constitute an imminent threat requiring quick and decisive action. Nothing could be further from the truth. Then there is the fact that the entire enterprise is not about rescuing the actors (who cares about them!?!), but on finding the missing director who set up this ridiculous scenario, in order to protect the reputation of the movie studio.

I cannot stop thinking that there might be something entirely different going on here than we are led to believe. Is Sammy Spotter being honest? Are the lions actually in a cage inside the house? Or are they old, toothless beasts ready for their last roar? Is Mark being conned into participating in some kind of secret Reality TV show? Is he being set up to be a fall guy? Or maybe it’s something even worse, planned by one of the clown criminals from his earlier adventures? Perhaps I’m just hoping for something spicy. Don’t let me down, Jules!