What exciting events occurred in Mark Trail’s world this past week? Let me look . . .uh, not much. The real action was the week before, when Cherry and Violet faced down a hungry bear rummaging through the new compost bins.

Rivera devoted this past week to closing out the e-waste story with Ranger Shaw and Mark cleaning up the debris in Lost Forest. In reality, the time was largely devoted to Ranger Shaw confessing to his own e-waste offense at this same illegal dump site! The ranger also complained he did not have the manpower to deal with the Grungey Boys, even though he knew of their actions for several weeks. Never mind that he had no problems calling in the local sheriff to haul them away only after Mark had corralled them. Finally, in Saturday’s strip Rusty came home with his A-grade paper on e-waste. Mark got assurances from Rusty that he hadn’t embarrassed Robbie in school. Rivera closed out this story with a pithy moral: “E-waste is not a game.” Get it? “Game”, as in Robbie’s buried game controllers. Yep, those controllers were the story hook that led us to think this adventure was going to be about Rusty and his Revenge Paper. But all that was buried by yet another Mark Trail Storyline Takeover. I wonder what would happen if he crossed strips and took over the current storyline in Mary Worth or Rex Morgan, MD?

This is, from what I can tell, a good summary of the Eastern Kingbird and its behavior. The orange (sometimes red) patch is normally hidden, only being exposed when it is in attack mode or when mating. But who knew Mark was a Shakespeare aficionado? Well, to keep the paraphrase closer to the original, perhaps Mark could have said “Uneven lies the head that wears an orange crown.”