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The Week in Review and the Sunday Nature Chat

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Miss this past week? The polluted lake story finally came to an end. Finally! Rivera even spelled it out, so clumsy doofs like me don’t miss it.

In any event, Mark and Happy worked like high school kids doing class reports the night before they were due. Happy found out that Chedderson had a granddaughter (sporting a similar hair feature) who might shame Chett into doing the right thing once she read their article in Teen Girl Sparkle. That’s a lot of assumptions for somebody he doesn’t even know. But wouldn’t you know it, she does read the magazine and did, in fact, called Gramps to complain. And just like that, Chett Chedderson went on the air and reported that his company would clean the Lost Forest waters. 

I’m not especially satisfied with the perfunctory way the story moved to its conclusion, since it relied on the off chance a young girl would act as Happy predicted. But as we have seen, time and time again, Rivera is not interested in serious storytelling as far as actual drama and sophisticated plots are concerned. Instead, it is all about simple storylines, bad jokes, and weird characters. Not that those are bad techniques that should be excluded, or that the story ideas are bad. It’s fine to include these features, but they shouldn’t be the extent of the plotting. Instead, they all get blended into some kind of story smoothie that lacks seriousness, real drama, or depth.

Looks like the prediction of groundhog/gophers/prairie dogs being the Sunday topic didn’t pan out. But bears, again!? There are thousands of animal species, along with countless natural sights and features, so I don’t know why Rivera keeps returning to bears, both on Sundays and in regular stories. Well, at least it gives Rivera more opportunities to improve her bear drawing, which appears to be working! I’ll also add that today’s strip shows a greater attention to detail and layouts than we’ve seen lately (excluding Mark’s ubiquitous presence).

Still, I’m all in for more diversity/variety in the Sunday topics.

Okay, now there’s a good reason not to go swimming in that particular lake!

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There goes Rivera once again, wringing out yet another sappy 3-panel gag strip, featuring the “mom packs for a six week vacation” trope. Real comedy gold. If the hokey poses of Mark and Rusty in panel 2 aren’t contrived enough, in panel 3 Rivera has them standing in the doorway, looking gobsmacked (“Uh-oh, there goes Mom again!”). Yet more sitcom tropes worthy of Nickelodeon. But this just does not fit Cherry’s personality. I’m wondering if Rivera is making these choices on her own or if she’s getting advised from people at King Features on ways to make a strip about nature and the environment appear cute and appeal to more readers (maybe like the kind of people who enjoy Hi and Lois and Garfield).

Art Dept. One day Rivera will figure out bears. As we’ve seen in the past, she’s used different approaches, or perhaps, different online sources. Now, using reference images is not a negative in comic strips. In fact, cartoonists have been using visual references for over 100 years. It’s a lot easier now since cartoonists don’t have to maintain filing cabinets full of photos and drawings.

I’m pretty sure that Rivera used this online image as her source. Note that she even used several of the same river rocks in her own representation.

Perhaps she manually traced it (as artists would have done in the past) and then improvised the texture and lighting. Or, she ran the image through several transformations with her software. Whatever, I think she went too far, creating a bear with a strange surface texture. Sometimes you just shouldn’t fool with Mother Nature.