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Well, I don’t know why Mark and Cherry are surprised by Honest Ernest’s actions. After all, they told him that they were not interested in the credit, just capturing the peacock. Yet here they are, dismayed at Ernest taking their word on it.
I was hopeful that Mark would at least explain how his trap worked; you know, just in case a peacock shows up in my backyard one day.
Okay. This is, uh … well, uh … naïve? Is some kind of time-lapse sequence happening here, where the peafowl eventually (and quite fortuitously, I might add) found its way to the correct spot and discovered the granola bar? It’s possible, though that’s a stretch because these birds don’t have an outstanding sense of smell.
But I’m dying to know how this trap actually worked. I’m thinking there is supposed to be some kind of motion-sensitive mechanism linked to the snack bar or its leafy support that springs the trap. That could explain why the trap is shown off to one side. I’m no hunter or trapper, so I’m hoping that the Saturday strip will get me up to speed. But based on panel 4, I just don’t see how this works.
I’m also hoping this is just a case of my own ignorance of such things and not that Rivera is just making up a bunch of crap.
Art Dept. Okay, Even Rivera refers to this bird as a male, so where the heck are the long tail feathers? They don’t retract into the body. Now, the female is noted for her lack of long tail features. They are a characteristic of the male peafowl, used both for attracting females and as a kind of self-defense. If you go back to July 12 and August 7, the bird clearly shows the full tail plumage.
Is it possible that Mark, Cherry, and Honest Ernest are chasing the wrong peafowl and wound up catching a female by mistake? After all, there are peafowl in the wild, having escaped from, or been set free by, private owners.
Now, that would really be a really interesting thing to see: Returning with the wrong bird, only to have Violet’s mother realize their mistake at the big Summer Banquet!
Frankly, I don’t know why they would want to help Honest Ernest, unless it was to help him sink into a deep hole. But, Cherry still has her job with the Sunny Soleil Society to keep. Maybe she could look for other clients, but I don’t imagine there are too many paying customers in that sleepy little village.
Are you confused by the storyline? Of course! Mark and Cherry have magically transferred into the Cherry and the Runaway Peacock story, leaving the lake pollution story, as well as the probably perplexed golfing party, on the other side of the comics page. I reckon Mark got his “you’re killing my environment” anger out of his system for the time being, as he seems happy to devote some time to this trivial event. But credit to Rivera for continuity: Mark’s facial scrapes from his fight with Brett remain in place.
Art Dept. Sometimes I wonder if Rivera uses marionettes as models for the characters. I mean, check out Mark in panel 3. And there are more of those “lines beyond the borders” today, too. One might think that Syndicate editors would catch that stuff and fix it before publishing. But that might be optimistic. It could be they just slap the strips online and send them out to the newspapers, as is.
All regular readers of Mark Trail are long familiar with Honest Ernest, who probably started life as the school bully; only now, he is depicted more like an older version of the Class Clown. So it makes sense that Rivera would depict him here in a role reminiscent of the Warner Brothers Coyote with his ACME butterfly net trying to catch the Roadrunner, played by local favorite, the take-no-prisoners wandering Peacock.
Art Dept. I noticed the same kind of pinched-in, distorted face in panels 3 and 4 today that I talked about yesterday. This kind of distortion of facial images in background figures has often plagued the strip, and I believe it might be due to size restrictions on Rivera’s digital (or manual) pen. It’s as if she is trying to cram too much detail where it becomes more noise than information.
PS: I sometimes look at the Comics Kingdom comments, but only after I post. So, I want to let you know that I did not pinch my Roadrunner analogy from Bill F‘s comment. Frankly, I figured most Mark Trail readers would have picked it up, anyway, especially with the pose of the peacock in panel 3.
Welcome back to the Third Annual National High School “Draw Mark Trail” exhibition, where the excitement level is hovering around the “Our son drew that one!” level.
We were all impressed with an entry from yesterday (Sunday), drawn by 10th grader Zigmodo R. Pettyfogger of Zuni, Ohio with a “Walking Dead” interpretation of our favorite wildlife journalist. Gotta say, Zigmo, you nailed that one! Okay, we hope to return to this exhibition, but for now, let’s get back to the current story…
“Segues!? We don’t need no stinkin’ segues!” The Mark-Brett confrontation has been pushed aside for the moment as Rivera makes a giant pivot at a moment’s notice, continuity be damned. At least her appearance on the greenway did stop the playground altercation going on, so there is that. But how is it that Cherry can’t seem to see the peacock she is looking for, as it continues to fly all around her? Or is that a depiction of her mental state?
And what will Mark do from here on, now that he’s blown his cover and killed whatever cooperation he might have been able to inveigle out of the Cheddersons?
What are we to make of this odd intrusion? In the past, Rivera has, on occasion, put Mark or Cherry into each other’s storyline, usually for a short time to help the other out. But this time around, it isn’t just Mark and Cherry doing cameos; we have a convergence of their two separate stories, to the point where it becomes a question as to whose plot we are currently following. Is this a bit of cinéma vérité, perhaps? Or am I just making stuff up because I wanted to use the term cinéma vérité ?
In other news: I just paid my yearly dues to renew the domain name (thytrailbedone.com) and storage space on WordPress for my daily scribbling. So I’m committed to another 365.25 days of following the misadventures of the Trail Family. Also, I was just daydreaming about what might happen if Jules Rivera turned the entire Trail family into a team of environmental journalists/advocates, going on assignments and saving the planet. You know, like in The Incredibles movies. Well, the Trails would probably lose the cabin for lack of a second income; and they could get arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor for keeping Rusty out of school and putting him into harm’s way.
Taken at face value (pun intended), Mark appears to be getting the worst of this “tussle.” Either Mark is holding back or his vaunted Two Fists O’ Jello … I mean, Justice, are not doing the job they were anointed to do.
Now, as for panel 2, I’m gobsmacked, as the Brits sometimes exclaim. We can see that Brett is shocked, as well. But I like his expression! Cherry showed up as if she is arriving at a neighbor’s backyard BBQ party … accompanied by her pet peacock!? I don’t see a string or leash, so how is it the peacock also showed up? They don’t even like people. Did Cherry win it over with her winsome ways? Did she bring along rare peacock food to entice it?
Or is the peacock on its way to actually attack the Cheddersons, just on principle?
At this point, I thinking that a once-plausible storyline has rolled into a hazard, and there will be penalties to pay.
Tip of the hat: Okay, what’s with today’s podcast title? If you observe all of the dialog today, notice that every statement ends with an exclamation point! This was pro-forma for dialog in the Mark Trail strips before Rivera took over. One of her improvements was to stop that and only use them when they were called for. And she has been fairly consistent with that. Until today. So, are all of those !s in every speech balloon appropriate for today?
As several of you know (or suspect), I try to get into the strip from various ways. I don’t want to simply or exclusively point out the bloopers. I want to shine light on the interesting, inventive, and positive aspects of the strip, as well. Sure, sometimes the weight falls on the former more than the latter. Well, maybe a lot more often than that.
With the peacock’s sudden appearance, will Honest Ernest grab it and thus, bring Cherry’s little side-story to a quick conclusion? It could happen! It could also be her shortest story on record.
Art Dept. The visual juxtaposition between high and low levels becomes an interesting problem when designing panel layouts. In panel 1, the ground appears to have been “tilted” to a degree to show Cherry and Honest Ernest looking up at Rusty. And we have Rivera’s stereotypical silhouettes in the background to suggest other attendees. The space between them and the adjacent downside view in panel 1 get muddied. And the angular alteration of the ground doesn’t work very well because the high and low spatial relationships are also ambiguous. Is Rusty looking down or across? Are Cherry and Ernest really below or more likely just standing on a slightly lower embankment off to the side?
The layout in panel 2 is much more credible. It’s actually done well, as Rusty clearly looks down to a more spatially coherent lower ground. Cherry and Ernest are clearly looking up. If there is any complaint, it would be Rivera’s tendency to use a profile when interacting with people positioned “behind.” I discussed this quirk on 7/30/25 and 7/31/25.
I could quibble about the drawing of Rusty’s and Cherry’s faces, as well, including curiously ambiguous facial anatomy and Cherry’s non-ending dripping from her pool incursion. But I’ll leave that to your own analysis.
Finally, we have the peacock landing on Honest Ernest’s head. On TV or the big screen, this avian assault would get plenty of chuckles. Or perhaps, shock, as we see Cherry’s reaction. Peacocks may, in fact, jump on you if they feel threatened by you. And I suppose the mere presence of Honest Ernest is threatening enough to just about anybody or any animal.
But the main issue here is the smaller size of the peacock. Perhaps that was done to fit on the head and within the panel better than drawing a more realistically-sized peacock. I don’t know. It just looks odd.
I must have studied Italian way, too much, because this isn’t making too much sense to me. Of course, my opening statement also doesn’t make much sense, but that’s just to clue you in on the collapsing state of my brain’s synapses.
Chedderson owns a shipping company. That isn’t being a builder. There is a peacock running amok on the golf course. Either this peacock is quite the runner or the Sunny Soleil Society is a stone’s throw from this resort. That makes it even harder to believe Cherry didn’t know of its existence. Mark is going to play golf with his backpack still strapped on. And taking a cue from Cherry, Happy is also making excuses for Mark. It’s as if they are all in on a secret and don’t want Mark to figure it out. That doesn’t seem too difficult. A few of you readers probably golf, yes? Looking back over the strips this week, I’m not sure I’ve seen a course that looks like this one.
This is the end of the second week for Mark’s storyline. By tradition, we should be heading back to a week of the dramatic story of Violet and the Lost Peacock. That might mean some time-travel for Cherry to get back into her work clothes and hunt down the peacock that we seem to be viewing in today’s strip. But, maybe this particular peacock is one of those feral peacocks known to roam through various southern states, as I mentioned last Sunday. Is it? As I wrote earlier, are these two storylines even on the same chronological timeline?
Not to give Rivera too much literary credit, but this temporal conundrum (largely of my own making!) reminds me a tiny bit of Kurt Vonnegut’s great book, Slaughterhouse 5 and how the book’s protagonist, Bill Pilgrim, time-traveled through various times of his life, as if time was not linear at all (this was also a great movie, by the way).
Art Dept. There is another visual puzzle depicted today, featuring what might appear to be a continuity problem. But is it? Can you spot it? And I don’t mean the bad inking job in panel 2 where it only looks like Mark is wearing a ball cap. But you wouldn’t be too far off.
I’ve been watching peacock (more accurately, peafowl) videos to hear what they sound like and act like. They appear to have several different calls: one like a cat, one like a chicken, one like a trumpet trying to sound like a car horn, and yet another like a kind of crow sound. Overall, have some 11 different calls and yells. Check them out on YouTube.
I found a few videos of peacocks screeching out something along the lines of what is depicted in panel 4. As varied as their calls are, it’s quite a sight to see them when they raise their tail feathers (or train).
Well, if this isn’t going to be a variant on the Banjo Cat and the Harpist cat hunt story, I wonder if they really resolved that problem of Banjo Cat running free and chasing down birds? A matchup may not go too well for ol’ Banjo Cat!
The Daily Trail 