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Mark Trail, 4/23/05

Be careful, insurance investigator guy whose name I can’t be bothered to look up! You may think you’re having a productive, professional chat with a respected member of the local law enforcement team, but you’re actually standing mere feet away from a bloodthirsty zombie who’s lulling you into a false sense of complacency so he can crack open your skull and eat your brains!

Admittedly, it can hard to tell the difference between a small-town sheriff and the walking undead. Here’s a few “warning signs” that may indicate a corpse reanimated through foul magic:

• Chalk-white skin
• Eyes with orange pupils
• Protruding cheekbones giving the face the appearance of a skull
• Deep shadows cast over one side of the face, seemingly at odds with the actual lighting in the room
• A thousand-mile stare that seems to wistfully harken back to a pre-death-and-unspeakably-evil-reanimation existence

If you think you might be talking to a zombie, run for higher ground! It’s a well-known fact that a zombie’s main mode of locomotion is an awkward shuffle, so they have some difficulty with inclines. In case of mass zombie takeover of your town, be sure to tune in to NOAA radio. If the usual weather report has been replaced by a guttural voice moaning “BRAINS … BRAINS!” over and over, you’re pretty much screwed.

Incidentally, it almost seems like Sherriff Zombie’s directions — “you can find him at Lost Forest” — are some kind of snide joke, but it’s commonly known that zombies have no sense of humor.

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Mark Trail, 4/17/05

Apparently last week’s killer tsunami was only the beginning of the Mark Trail carnage. This week the focus is on tornadoes, but the topic has really broadened to nature’s wrath in general. And what do we see here? While the puny humans have their seeming superiority stripped away by the awesome power of the winds and rain, the wild beasts, long tormented by mankind, gloat at the carnage wreaked upon their bipedal oppressors. The squirrel in panel three looks positively gleeful about the car being swept away in the flood — perhaps he saw too many of his nut-gathering friends crushed to death beneath its cruel tires! The beavers in the last panel, meanwhile, seem to be taking a more philosophical view of the twister as it tears the wooden homes of men to bits: they seem confident that their dam will make it through the storm, but don’t mind taking a moment out of their busy schedule to watch the plans of their rivals come to naught. The only animal to look panicked by the situation is the dog in the lower lefthand panel — and we all know what happens to collaborators and Uncle Toms when the revolution comes, don’t we? It looks like Mark is trying to get in good with the majestic flying geese and ducks in anticipation of the imminent nature-driven apocalypse.

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Mark Trail, 4/10/05

Did you know that “Mark Trail” is actually an Estonian word? It’s derived from “Mark,” meaning “smug,” and “Trail,” meaning “tsunami-surviving bastard.” Yes, after four meticulous months of research and the painstaking artistic rendering of piles of smashed old-timey trucks and devastated ’50s-era mill towns, Mark Trail has unleashed its Very Special Tsunami Episode. I love how Mark stands idly by in the first few panels as death and destruction runs rampant mere feet away. I also like the fact that all of his advice ends with “run to high ground.” Weird-looking cloud on the horizon? Run to high ground! No lifeguards at the beach? Run to high ground! Goateed Indian artifacts dealers skulking about? For God’s sake, run to high ground!

Also, good advice on waiting for the all clear on NOAA weather radio. Unless you’re one of the ignorant few who doesn’t know what station NOAA weather radio is on. Or, God forbid, you live in some filthy third-world hellhole that doesn’t even have an NOAA. In which case, screw you, tsunami-bait.