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Mark Trail, 10/30/04

I’m not the first to note this, but Jack Elrod doesn’t seem to like drawing people very much. Maybe that’s why everyone in Mark Trail looks the same. Whenever he can, he pulls back the “camera” to give us some lovely frolicking animal shots. Unfortunately, his word balloons are often nowhere near the tiny, distant humans who are supposed to be saying said words, so it usually looks like the animals are conversing among themselves. For instance, there’s no other normal way to interpret today’s strip but to assume that the leftmost bird is proposing a quick trip to the Florida Keys. At least it isn’t talking to the dolphins, though; as near as I can tell, the reply is coming from the boat itself. I’m not sure if that’s more or less realistic.

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Mark Trail, 10/23/04

I’m very much looking forward to seeing this whole bunch on a future episode of Ricki Lake entitled “Bitch, I’m-a steal your man!” At last, the artifact-wrangling is taken care of and now the cat-fighting can begin. Cherry may have a porn star’s name, but she clearly has a thing or two to learn about keeping a man satisfied. When your boyfriend has just snagged an evil artifact-smuggler with nothing more than an ordinary fishing line (an act so at odds with the known laws of physics that it wasn’t even depicted in the strip) you don’t just tell him he “did good”; you slobber all over him and ask him to tell you some fascinating facts about migratory birds, if you know what I mean (and I think you do). At least Cherry and Kelly are on a level playing field in terms of attire: they’re both wearing matching pink polo shirts, presumably because they know they make Mark hot.

Meanwhile, I’m beginning to suspect that Mark’s fishing buddy “Bill” is actually Slate magazine founder Michael Kinsley.

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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.