What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Who Are These Guys Mark Trail Is Punching? October 2018 – January 2019

If you’re trying to understand the current storyline in James Allen’s Mark Trail, this is a good piece to read. Unless it’s later than about April 2019. If it is, I’ll probably have a more up-to-date plot recap here. Good luck finding what you need.

If you need discussions of mathematically-themed comic strips, you can find some on my other blog, and I’d be glad if you tried them out too.

Mark Trail.

21 October 2018 – 13 January 2019.

My last check-in on Mark Trail had almost no Mark in it. Instead, Rusty Trail and Mara, a girl he met on the plane down to Mexico, took the lead. Rusty and Mara noticed assistant archeologist Becky was passing artefacts to someone who didn’t look like he was a museum. They follow the man, Juanito, to the nearby town of Santa Poco. There he explains to them he’s a courier, but they’re welcome to come with him since this isn’t a great part of town.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 19th of November, 2018. You forget how weird the theme song to Friends gets in the third verse. But that’s what you get for going back and listening to the “full” version of any TV show’s theme songs. They’re all either nervous repetitions of whatever the part that came on-screen was, or they’re weird riffs on the TV show lyrics that have maybe aged in unfortunate ways. Looking at you, Cheers.

Pursuing Juanito, Rusty, and Mara, is a motorcycle-riding, long-haired guy named Raul. Raul has some connection to Joe/José. José’s been truck-driving for the archeologists. And also watching all this artefact-passing. And making suspicious-sounding CB radio calls to Raul. So when we left off we were looking at a motorcycle-fueled chase in the bad parts of Santa Poco. Rusty and Mara were in the company of a man of unknown-to-us objectives. And they were pursued by men of unknown-to-us objectives. A bit confusing, yes, but the last several months of strip have given some clarity to who’s trying to do what and why.

Rusty and Mara run down an alley. Raul calls out, claiming to be a friend of Mark Trail’s. They don’t buy it, and find a lucky hole in the wall to dig through. Raul calls José, asking him to call Mark back into the story. He’ll chase the kids. And warns he’s going to leave his bike “in this nasty alley with rats … big rats!” It’s a declaration so intense I feel like it’s got to refer to something, but I don’t know what. José does call Mark, promising to explain everything when he gets there.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 27th of November, 2018. “I suppose I do occasionally think about if José were a robot made of Moon Cheese and whether he’d still like me if he were, and whether that answer would depend on whether he were a hard or a soft Moon Cheese robot. That’s kind of a strange thought about José, but … I mean, why do you wonder, Mark Trail?”

Mark asks senior archeologist Howard Carter (get it?) if there’s something funny about José. This allows us to enter into the plot that José seems “more complicated” than they expect from their truck driver. But they allow that he seems more educated than the average person around town. Mark figures, what the heck, let’s see what’s going on.

Raul, on the rooftops, takes time from yelling at toucans to notice them. He misses one leap from rooftop to rooftop, and falls through a skylight. He lands on the supper table of a couple who take a man falling through their roof in distractingly good spirits. They listen to his story of chasing someone around town all day. They offer him some landed-on empanadas. And they let him throw a lamp through the window to get out because the door was in the wrong direction? He leaves them money for the damages, at least.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 7th of December, 2018. So I’m no good at small talk. If I had just fallen through someone’s skylight and smashed onto their dinner table, flattening their supper, I would never think to talk about the pleasantness of that room’s odors.

It’s a bizarre interaction. What it read like was a comic beat in a genially dopey mid-80s movie that’s trying to be Romancing The Stone. You know, about forty minutes in, and the protagonist finally realized he has to do something about the people who stole the necklace that woman stuffed in his carry-on, and he pratfalled out of his chase, and now the director’s mother who’s thrilled to be in a movie is cleaning him up. It may be James Allen was going for that effect.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 11th of December, 2018. And see again, if some strange man crashed through my ceiling and landed on my supper table, and shared with me a story about how frustrated he was chasing someone through the city all day, I wouldn’t think to talk about how my cooking might be a useful pick-me-up. This is because I am deeply incompetent at promoting my brand.

Rusty and Mara figure they’ve escaped Raul. They figure to find Juanito by using the tracking app on the phone they dropped in his backpack. Juanito’s not looking for them. He’s delivering Becky’s artefacts to some silhouetted figures. They chuckle about how the collectors buying smuggled artefacts will give them a nice Christmas bonus. The chuckling happens right before Christmas, reader time. It makes an odd bit of time-binding for the story, though. Story strips are vulnerable to some weird time dilations. Like, this story, which has run since April, has been only a couple of days for the characters.

Anyway, the boss, Boss, and his underling Jefe, are barely done giggling about this when the phone rings. It’s Rusty’s Mom calling. Boss, Jefe, and Juanito realize they’re in a lot of trouble when Cherry Trail addresses them by full name including their middle names. Raul curses Rusty and Mara for following the tracking app right into Juanito’s boss’s lair. He figures it’s time to call José.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 21st of December, 2018. “We have talked about this! Cell phones are pleasant. But it is their nature to spoil people’s abilities to be fully present. Instead of experiencing as a coherent whole what you are doing in person, or what you are doing with your online community, you experience this shadowy, half-dreaming state. You feel alive, because you’re twitching in response to interruptions. It’s thrilling, but it doesn’t satisfy your need as a social being to participate in things. You’d do better to set time to be wholly present in person, or wholly present online, and experience the healing action of emotional and mental continuity.”

José meanwhile is talking with Mark Trail, and Professor Carter. He’s finally collapsing the quantum waveform of sides and motivations of this story. José’s an undercover cop, which according to the rules of Mark Trail puts him on the side of Good. He’s been undercover, investigating Becky for smuggling archeology. Rusty and Mara saw one of their agents at the temple. They pulled that agent back, and sent in Raul to intercept the kids. So yes, Raul may have spent months in the story grumbling about Rusty and Mara, and thinking of them as “those brats”. But he’s not a bad guy, he just doesn’t feel as though he has to like two kids he doesn’t know and who’ve been making his life harder. It’s a step toward more real characters in Mark Trail. It means someone can be on the Good side without liking the lead characters.

Now they know where the kids are, but also that Boss, Jefe, and Juanito are there too. So they figure, better to bring along Mark Trail, in case somebody needs punching.

And boy do they ever need punching. Mark recognizes Boss and Jefe. They were in a story in early 2016, from just before I started recapping plots regularly. Back then Boss and Jefe were smuggling humans into the southwestern United States. It partly showed off the ecological consequences of this. And partly got Mark Trail and company caught in an endless yet fascinating series of caves. That storyline left the human-traffickers’ fates unresolved. That alone was a major change from the linear, self-contained stories of Jack Elrod.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 12th of January, 2019. I’m aware that many of the strips I excerpted here weren’t that visually exciting: a lot of tight shots of people’s faces. Well, the first panel brightens things up by showing Mark Trail making the eye expression that Michael Dorn had to use whenever Worf felt an emotion. And that second panel is a solid “Yeah, so this is why we started reading Marvel Comics in the 60s” image.

And I know, you’re wondering: wait, they’re trafficking humans and they’re smuggling pre-Mayan artefacts? Aren’t those separate lines of work? All I can say is that the gig economy is becoming more respectable, and there’s now ways for everyone in the underworld to pick up a side hustle. Boss and Jefe signed up early for Smuglr. It’s the crime-sharing app that’s disrupting the traditional black markets by cutting out the hench-middle-men. And it’s one I’m happy to welcome as the newest advertiser on my podcast.

One might ask how a reader should recognize these guys. They were a small presence a couple of years ago and in a very different context. But, hey, Funky Winkerbean expects readers will thrill to recognize names from the supporting cast of John Darling. And that’s not weird at all. So I don’t know what to tell you. Well, Mark’s filling everyone in.

And finally, after several stories of nothing more exciting than islands blowing up, Mark Trail is punching baddies. This probably indicates that the story is coming near an end. It’s been a big one; it started back in April. All the major narrative questions are answered, or looking nearly answered. There have been a couple stray bits. But I’m going ahead and supposing any weirdly specific detail never mentioned again is a reference to something I haven’t seen. I’m thinking of the Zuni fetish doll delivered anonymously in a box and that gets moved during the day. I’m sure that means something.

I just know I’m going to have to re-use the follow-up question for this plot summary. But, what the heck. It’s the question that people reading this essay would want answered.

Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead panel for the 20th of August, 2002. Part of a storyline in which a “realistically drawn woman” interrupts the comic and Griffy (left) goes on a search through the story comics to try to find where she belongs.

Sunday Animals Watch

What amazing yet endangered animals, plants, or natural phenomenon have been highlighted in recent Sunday strips? These.

• Parsnips, 21 October 2018. Apparently they can doom you!
• Tegu Lizards, 28 October 2018. We’ve gotten them to be invasive to Florida, so, good work everyone.
• Giant Silk Moth, 4 November 2018. They seem to be doing all right for themselves.
• Japanese macaques, 11 November 2018. Not actually threatened, which seems to break the rules for non-human primates.
• Naked Mole Rats, 18 November 2018. You just know they’re going to make Rufus some other species for the live-action movie.
• Hammerhead sharks, 25 November 2018.
• Green Crabs, 2 December 2018. They’re going invasive, but they’ve inspired one area of Italy to try making them dinner, so that’s something I suppose.
• Wondiwoi Tree Kangaroos, 9 December 2018. So for 85 years westerners only knew of it from one sample, but last year British naturalist Michael Smith took some photos of one, so, they’re probably not doing well but they’re not actually extinct yet?
• The Jacuzzi of Despair, 16 December 2018. It’s a 100-foot wide zone, three thousand feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico, that’s too briney for anything to live, which is neat and weird and unsettling.
• Frankincense, 23 December 2018. It’s not just for making Christmastime jokes about Frankincense’s Monster anymore!
• Manatees, 30 December 2018. Incredibly endangered despite being crazy popular.
• White Lions, 6 January 2019. Unbelievably endangered. This one mentions particularly a sterile white lion in danger of being auctioned off, possibly to canned-hunters.
• The Lowland Bongo, 13 January 2019. Not threatened yet, but the year is young.

Next Week!

I spent so much of 2018 infuriated with Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. Did I spend the end of 2018 and the start of 2019 similarly angry? Check back in next week and we’ll see!