The Advanced Archive found 5 posts!

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Mark Trail, 9/25/04

So we’ve known for some time that Captain Simpson was up to no good. Now at last we’ve found out that the Macguffin for this month’s adventure is … priceless Indian artifacts! You know, just like it was two or three adventures ago, when Mark was left in the desert to die and managed to bring down an airplane with nothing but a chunk of petrified cactus. Does it mean that I’ve been reading Mark Trail for too long when I’m noticing that it repeats itself?

Personally, I was hoping that the fishing expedition was actually a front for drug running. But I guess I have to turn to Mary Worth if I want narcotics action.

I’ve also been wondering over the course of this storyline about Otto, the bizarrely accented cook. He has facial hair, so he must be bad, but he loves his cat, so he must be good! Now that the hirsute ship’s master has swatted the beloved Rosebud, it’s clear that Otto’s one of the good guys. Apparently, mountain man beard trumps Cary Grant mustache in the world of Mark Trail villains. Presumably he’ll help Mark defeat the artifact smugglers — and maybe even get a decent shave.

By the way, if you grow disconsolate between episodes of Mark Trail, the comic strip, you can now groove along to “Mark Trail,” the song, by Scott McKnight. That link takes you directly to the MP3 file, so don’t click on it at work unless you want everyone to know that you like Mark Trail. (The song was highlited (highlit?) by Editrix on the comments page of the Interbridge Weblog — how’s that for blogrolling?)

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Mark Trail, 10/13/04

I consider myself something of an expert on the subject, and I can say with a certain authority that the assemblage in the first panel of today’s Mark Trail is the funniest thing in that strip in the last two years. It’s funnier than Mark downing an airplane with a petrified cactus; it’s funnier than the golfer throwing away his clubs and fleeing in terror from the crocodile; it’s funnier than the burping cows. The totem-poll look to the whole thing, as Primrose balances on the baddie’s bald head and Otto cuts him off at the knees, is great, as is the stock of the rifle caught in mid-air. I guess that Otto’s cat-loving trumps his mustache-having, and presumably Mark will forgive and forget his past involvement in priceless-artifact-smuggling if he turns stool pigeon.

Back in the beginning of this storyline, it looked as if the meat of the conflict was going to come from Mark’s current and former girlfriends having to share space on the same tiny boat. Tension! Cat fights! Hilarity! But Mark Trail can’t turn away from a good Indian artifact yarn, and so we get cat fights of a somewhat different kind.