We left Mark in Texas the week before, worried about his personal welfare while in the company of Tess Tigress, so we could return to Lost Forest in order to do a little catch-up with Peach, Olive, and Cherry. The concern is whether Peach should sign on with Holly Folly’s apparel business. Seems Holly is into fast fashion, which generates a high turnover of knockoff clothing designed to be discarded after a few outings in time for the next trend to hit the racks. Olive is concerned that Peach will be taken advantage of and wind up supporting a business model that is the antithesis of her “upcycled” clothing. But Holly seems blinded by the fame and association with Holly Folly, a popular online fashion influencer.

So Olive drove Cherry to the local landfill and proceeded to find examples of discarded clothing—especially examples of discarded Holly Folly clothing—in order to move Cherry over to her side and put together enough evidence to convince Peach to not sign on the dotted line. For some reason not  explained, Peach was not able to go on this fact-finding trip, so Olive took photos and videos to bring back. But Cherry retained doubts whether they could convince Peach to walk away from the deal.

With that, we end the usual week-long segment of Cherry’s adventure to return to Mark’s assignment, where he is supposedly going on an overnight camping and hunting trip with Tess and husband Jess. And it’s just in time for the big storm projected to blow through!

It’s a bit late in the year to do a Sunday page on Autumn leaves, don’t you think? Was this a scheduling mistake at the main office? In any event, Rivera gives us another well-conceived title panel. Panel 3, focuses on a single branch, offering an interestingly-designed image suggesting increasingly cold weather. But the orange background is a poor decision, muddying the mood. Autumn days can be intensely bright. The textual content today is fair, which is to say the information shouldn’t be a surprise to most of us. But the overall visual effect looks rushed, and the grand finale panel showing only two small trees is positively anemic and underwhelming, the very antithesis of what Mark is saying. And no, they don’t look beautiful. The trees look like they have been run through special effects filters to create some kind of high contrast, polarized effect, as if they are radioactive. Rivera should have just thrown caution to the wind and drawn a picturesque stand of Fall trees along a shoreline. And omit Mark!