What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Why aren’t you reviewing Flash Gordon? October 2023 – January 2024

Eh, no big reason. Just decided I felt like doing Jules Rivera’s strip first. I figure to incorporate Flash Gordon into my What’s Going On In series, I just haven’t decided where and when. Whenever that does appear, it’ll be among my story strips essays, gathered here, as well as under its own tag.

Meanwhile, Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail already has a tag, and a bunch of essays, going back to before she even took over the comic. This essay should bring you up to mid-January 2024 in his adventures. If you’re reading this essay after about April 2024, there’s probably a more up-to-date recap there. Meanwhile, though, here’s what I do know:

Mark Trail.

21 October 2023 – 14 January 2024.

Mark Trail’s story, back in October, was about the strange artefacts found in the woods that Rusty Trail thought might be from aliens. Mark Trail thought they were more likely a lost and very misinformed camper. Cherry Trail’s story was about someone leaving angry notes about people having kudzu on their properties. Let me take that one first.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 15th of November, 2023. I like the visual pun of Violet shrinking over the course of the strip.

Cherry Trail teams up with Sunny Soleil Society head Violet Cheshire, and local baker Squirrelly Sandy Sandy’s the last person to have gotten a note, written in purple ink. They set out looking for who might write cursive notes in purple ink and — oh, Sandy’s squirrels attack Violet Cheshire. Under barely any pressure at all Violet confesses the whole deal: she was bored, she wanted to be out in nature and found an excuse to have Cherry Trail do it with her. And that, the 18th of November, closes the Kudzu Crusader Caper. All in all, this wasn’t too tough a case for Inspector Bazalo.

Cherry — and Violet’s — next adventure started the 27th of November, with the two planning to clear out an hold hall and put on a show. In the hall is every bat in the world. Violet, of course, hires Honest Ernest to clear the bats out, and he gets scratched or maybe bitten by one. Now, it’s not likely that any one bat has rabies, and it’s not likely that any one bite will infect you. On the other hand, if you are infected, then anytime up to a year later you can wake up one morning feeling a little off, and then close the day out dead. So, at Cherry and Violet’s insistence, they go to the emergency room, to get Ernest his shots, and there happen to meet Mark Trail over in his plot, which I’ll get to now.

---

Rusty Trail, head full of ideas of aliens, doesn’t believe his father’s hypothesis that all the weird stuff they found was from a lost camper. So he sneaks out in the middle of the night to find the truth out there. Mark Trail, happening to overhear, follows. They find the lost camper, though, someone named Connor who’d followed former prank-show star Tad Crass’s AI-written camping guide to his regret. Mark Trail feels relieved they saved this guy, but what about everybody else?

Mark Trial decides to run nature retreats and teach people how to camp in reasonable safety. His friends at the De-Bait Team are glad to give support. Connor, signed up for this retreat for some reason, is less glad. Ranger Shaw is there, looking for something to fill the void in his life since his wife’s out of town. Mark Trail realizes there’s stuff going on with the men of Lost Forest he’s not nearly up to dealing with.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 4th of January, 2024. My first What’s Going On In … strip for 2024! No wonder the raccoon in the first panel looks so excited!

De-Bait Team member Cliff suggests a nature hike, something giving all the guys a chance to talk things out. Mark Trail’s not clear on why you would go hiking and talk when that offers very little chance to catch fish and not talk. Anyway, Connor, trying to bait a hook, tears his thumb apart instead. Thus the emergency room visit which brought together the peanut butter and chocolate of Mark Trail’s and Cherry Trail’s plots.

Mark Trail finally accepts Cliff’s proposal, and takes the gang on a hike. It turns out to be a great way to get guys talking about their feelings. Mark Trail has heard of feelings, yes, but he’s not sure he’s up for experiencing them himself. The hike turns into a group hug so fast Mark Trail barely knows what happened or why, and he’s a bit relieved when Eli, one of the campers, gets scratched by a stray bat. Back to the emergency room.

Cliff meets the situation with optimism not unlike mine in the situation: the suggestion of danger will draw more people in next time. And Mark Trail is coming to realize these retreats might be more useful to their participants if they’re about sharing feelings, much as he likes going fishing to not talk about feelings or anything else. Mark Trail thinks a little about why that is, but the important thing is: the campers are up for fishing. Good news for everyone but the fish and the bait.

And this brings us up to mid-January, in plotting.

Sunday Animals Watch!

• Coywolves, 22 October 2023.
• Armadillos, 29 October 2023.
• Fireflies, 5 November 2023.
• Autumn Leaves, 12 November 2023.
• Turkeys, 19 November 2023.
• Rabies, 26 November 2023.
• Foxes, 3 December 2023.
• Birds’ magnetic senses, 10 December 2023.
• Reptiles and Skin, 17 December 2023.
• Reindeer, 24 December 2023.
• AI computing, 31 December 2023.
• Horses, 7 January 2024.
• Largemouth Bass, 14 January 2024.

Next Week!

You know who’s not risking an attack by rabid bats? Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth, to be reviewed next week. But be warned: there is someone who just happened to notice you had a guitar here and knows a couple of songs he could play if nobody minds?

In Which It Turns Out I’m Just A Fool Who Got Fooled, Foolishly

So the other day I mentioned the English sport of competitively dancing while the opposing team throws a beer-soaked rag at you and I supported that by linking to Wikipedia’s entry about the English sport of competitively dancing while the opposing team throws a beer-soaked rag at you. There I figured the matter rested, since England has all sorts of things to do and they will include things like hitting each other on purpose. Also I swear I saw this show where there was a football match that had gone on at a public school for over a century now without either team scoring or being expected to score, but I can’t find the reference now and for all I know somebody’s gone and scored.

Anyway, my love came across this and figured that can’t possibly be. And then went and actually read the article and came to the conclusion that it didn’t make any sense, and the more you looked at it the less sense it made. And read the citations, all of which made very little sense and the less the more you looked at them. And the comments, which in the least sensible thing of all, don’t make the reader despair of the concept of humanity.

So there we have it. The whole thing looks to be a hoax, more or less. At least, it started out as a prank perpetrated for the comedy show It’s A Square World and it’s sort of stumbled on from there. I should have known, since the whole of England is pretty much a prank that got going so successfully that sometime around when they pulled the “Parliament of Bats” and nobody called them on it they realized they were stuck holding an actual country. I suppose dancing while the opposing team throws a beer-soaked rag at you isn’t likely to have such far-reaching global implications. Still, I feel a fool for not going and actually checking and I can only thank my love for showing where I was fooled. It was called the Parliament of Bats because attendees weren’t allowed to take their swords in with them, not because they were small flying mammals, which is all the more shame.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

New pen day! It’s new pen day! Everybody has new pens and they’re feeling so good that even thought we called off work early the index was up something or other, who cares, it’s new pen day and everything can be all right with the world!

105

A Partial Review of the Plants and Animals of Australia

Kangaroos. For this review I regard ‘Kangaroo’ as including all the variant models. Kangaroos, Wallabies, Potoroos, Wallaroos, Pottabies, Wottabies, Kangabies, plus any of the new 4th-generation-compatible variations to come out the last month. Doesn’t matter. They’re great all around. Fine body plan. Fur that can feel surprisingly like my sideburns when they get the most bushy and out of control. They anthropomorphize well by just adding a vest and maybe a pair of glasses. They’ve got everything under control. Rated A. The only thing keeping them from an A+ is the sloppy design job regarding the male genitalia. Granted that most mammals have design problems on this point. The only species that’s really got that handled with dignity are guinea pigs, the males of which keep their out-of-use private parts in safety deposit banks with an institution in Lima, Peru.

This kangaroo was not in Australia when I photographed him. Neither was I.

Koalas. Generally adorable, with great ears. But they have been coasting on past fame since the mid-80s. They’ve done nothing to freshen up the line to respond to the rise of fennecs for the status of “oh such adorable animals they look like plush toys only they’re alive!”. Nostalgia acts are fine but we should make way for new innovation. B.

Alpine Tasmanian button grass. Much-needed bit of flora with the sort of name we have the word “mellifluous” for. As plant life goes these are plants that live while not dead. Button grass looks like the hair of a minor Peanuts character with a name like “Leland”. Shows good imaginative use of the “long thin stuff with beady tops” motif. B+.

Platypus. You figure the platypus came about from someone hearing a jumbled description of a griffon and going wild with what they had. And that’s great. Some awesome stuff comes about from trying to follow a jumbled description. It’s how we got centaurs and Cincinnati chili and Chinese lion costumes and some other things that don’t start with ‘c’. All that’s fine and this blend has a nice self-assured weirdness to it. And then it sweats milk. That’s getting into strange-for-the-sake-of-strange territory. C+, would accept resubmission. Not of milk.

Wombats. Are real things? Huh. I thought they were made up so cartoons could do stories about Australian wildlife without getting into hassles from the real species over inaccurate depictions. You know, the way they make a movie about “Charles Foster Kane” instead of William Randolph Hearst, or a political TV show will do a story about going to war with a fake country, or people will vacation in “Florida”. OK, if they’re real then. C, get your brand identity under control. Next.

James Allen’s Mark Trail for the 6th of March, 2016, doing us the public service of reminding us to never have anything to do with nature, ever, under any circumstances.

Octopus Stinkhorn. I just learned about this on Sunday thanks to Mark Trail and WHAT THE HECK, Australia. WHAT THE FLIPPING HECK? You know when we other continents talk about the problem of Australian species THIS is the sort of thing we’re talking about, right? We’re talking about spiders that have enough toxin in each of their fourteen venom sacs to knock unconscious 6.25 billion people and every raccoon in North America. We’re talking about snakes that spontaneously detonate with the force of a malfunctioning Saturn V rocket smashing into a xylophone Daffy Duck rigged with dynamite to make getting rid of Bugs Bunny “look like an accident”. And now we’re talking about octopus-tentacled corpse-smelling alien-egg fungus. REALLY? What is even WRONG with you? I mean, you give us a tree kangaroo, a kangaroo that literally lives in trees, and you follow that up with this? Stop, go back, redo this entire disaster from the start, and by redo I mean “never do anything even remotely inspired by anyone who has thought this a possible idea again”. This doesn’t even get a grade because we need to invent whole new letters to deal with how flipping WRONG EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS. I mean, just, I mean. The flipping heck? I mean. Just. UGH.

Microbats. Microbats! Australia’s got lots of microbat species and they’re exactly what you think, bats that are small. Everything great about bats only little. This could get us back on Australia’s side. Even the name of the grouping is so adorable we don’t worry about whether they’re flying into the nostrils of everyone in Canberra. Microbats! B+ and not just because we’re getting them right after alien egg octopus corpse fungus. Seriously, Australia.

Marsupial tigers. OK, so, they’re kind of dog-shaped, and they have kangaroo heads. They have pouches, males and females. They’ve got tiger stripes down their back and tail. Oh yeah, and they’ve been extinct since Joseph Lyons was the prime minister. Great job piddling away an easy win, Australia. Check the backs of your closet and anywhere else they might be hiding and you can re-submit for an A-. I just … honestly.

Included for contrast: a non-Australian animal which was not in Australia when I photographed her.

Editorial note. While reviewing Wikipedia’s entry on the flora of Australia I encountered this sentence. “The dominant Acacia species varies with the location, and may include lancewood, bendee, mulga, gidgee and brigalow.” The page is clearly still subject to rampant vandalism. Fix and re-submit.

Creatures Of The Night

Among the stuff dug out of the attic and basement for the yard sale has been a couple of Furby dolls, which turn out to almost kind-of work for the most part. With the new batteries put in it turns out at least one of them will suddenly pop its eyes open and start muttering chipper things in Furbish, the sing-songy language created by JRR Tolkein, and then keep at it a couple minutes until it gets bored and goes back to sleep for hours and hours.

This made us realize: when the thing was put up in the attic years ago, with batteries in, it was probably doing the same thing, waiting for a random moment and then popping open its servo-controlled eyes and wiggling its slightly lopsided ears and demanding attention in one of several dozen phonemes, and then falling back into a silent wait that might end without warning.

So, now we can finally explain why the bats in our attic were having nightmares all those years. Good to know.