Would the Person From Area Code 661 Who Tried to Call Me Please Exist?

There’s not much chance I was going to answer the phone anyway, but the phone telling me — at 9:45 pm — that someone allegedly from area code “661” wanted me was ridiculous. First, it’s not allowed to call someone after 9 pm. Second, there is not a chance “661” is a legitimate area code. It’s barely a legitimate three-digit number, let alone something that might represent a group of people who all lived in the same area between 2004 and 2007 when they got a cell phone. Not buying it, not even trying to buy it, just, no. Whoever you are, I know better than to think you’re there.

I Am Also Curious About the Kids Serving the Lord by Getting a Pressure Cooker

So there I was, reading 70-year-old comic books as one will, and ran across a cute enough four-panel joke featuring Custer Crocodile and some dog who was so famous back in the day as to need no on-stage identification. I know the presumption here is if I say something, I’m making a joke, but here’s something I mean sincerely. I like the look of Custer Crocodile here. He’s got some nice styling on his snout there, particularly the not-really-necessarily line down the middle. Also I like that his arm, foot, and tail casts are themselves bandaged. Nice bit of set dressing on the gag. And then I noticed the advertisement on top, urging kids to win prizes by selling their Religious Wall Motto plaques. I know it’s hard to even see an advertisement but try looking at it now and see if you see.

Page 27 of Standard Comics’s (Not That) Buster Bunny #16, cover date October 1953. I’m also curious about the Powerful Table Radio. Would I have a table powerful enough to set it on? Would I be allowed to set it on top of the record cabinet instead, since that’s closer to the electrical outlet? Or does it not need electricity, instead drawing its might from the powerful table? Is that why it needs a powerful table? Can I use a regular table if I’ve adapted it to plug in to a wall socket?

So there’s the pitch: the world is on fire, mankind being crushed by crime and graft and dope and war and drink. So why don’t you serve the Lord and get … an Arthur Godfrey Ukulele. I admit my main associations with Arthur Godfrey are from the Dance Studio, because I’ve confused him with Arthur Miller, and learning from an old game show that he fired singer Julius La Rosa on-air to everyone’s surprise. My research suggests he (Godfrey) did play the ukulele, though, so that checks out I guess. But I also would not have associated him with cowboy hats. Anyway I guess I just wonder how fun this Fun Man Department is.

What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Who is this ‘Ann Parker’? November 2023- February 2024

Ann Parker, who entered the strip the last day of 2023 and has been the focus since, is in fact part of Nicholas P Dallis’s original cast of the strip! Mark Carlson’s excellent listing of major characters describes her as “[ often ] engaged in ill-advised romances. She graduated with a nursing degree but is rarely shown utilizing it”. Carlson offers examples, including romances to a man with “criminal connections”, being stalked by a psychopath who later takes her hostage, being engaged to a jewel thief, and finally deciding between a penniless two-timing playboy and a struggling young attorney. She last appeared in the strip in 1968, around the time of Judge Alan Parker’s wedding to Katherine, and the strip’s transition to being about Sam Driver and Abbey ParkerSpencer.

After 55 years she’s back and ready to compete for the Ham Gravy Trophy for Formerly Important Characters Forgotten By Their Comic Strip. If that doesn’t sound anything like what you’re reading in Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker that’s probably because you’re reading these words after around May 2024. If you are in that distant future, there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap here. Otherwise, or if you’re looking for how we got to Ann Parker running for mayor of Cavelton, read on here.

And to answer your other question: the last several months Bret Blevins has been doing the art, in place of the ill Mike Manley. I don’t know why Blevins isn’t putting his name in the credit box. My guess is a contractual obligation, possibly something relating to health care, as the deranged United States model of employer-based health care causes many goofy results. But Blevins’s filling in is why the art looks different. Also the suddenness with which Blevins had to step up may explain some of the art panel reuse, like from the 5th, the 6th, and the 7th of January this year.

Judge Parker.

26 November 2023 – 17 February 2024.

After resolving more assassin stuff the Judge Parker cast was looking forward to a quiet holiday season. That got disrupted with April and Randy Parker’s house being swarmed by CIA agents again. It turns out April’s mother Helena Bowen Or Bowers is dead. Or believed dead. At least, her body was found dead. But the truck carrying her body to autopsy was stopped, the driver and security detail killed, and the body stolen. April, offended by the suggestion she might know something about the woman she lived with secretly for years, declares she’s had enough of the CIA suspecting her of knowing something and quits the agency.

Francesco Marciuliano and Bret Blevins’s Judge Parker for the 28th of December, 2023. I’m glad April is taking this all so well. It’d be easy to handle the secret death of a parent badly. (And speaking of reused artwork: the 29th and with a zoom in 30th of December can be disorienting to look at in rapid succession.)

After some Christmas family moments of happiness, New Year’s Eve arrives and some fresh family moments of awkwardness. Ann Parker is back, Randy understating things by explaining to April that they haven’t seen her in “over twenty years”. While April is on full double red alert, Alan Parker is happy to hear his prodigal daughter’s tale. She’s married — not to David, the guy she was with when last seen, before Lyndon Johnson quit the presidential race — but someone else. And she needs money, a lot of it.

She doesn’t get it from Alan Parker, not with a story like that. Also, while she was in the bathroom, he checked her purse and found an ID for “Doris Lachlan”. April surmises that Ann is doing identity frauds, and that there must be serious trouble if she’s going to her father now. She suspects blackmail. Also that she’s now killed the “Doris Lachlan” persona.

Which is what brings Don Barnes to the law detective offices of Sam Driver and company. He was married-ish to Doris Lachlan, who ran off with a lot of money they were supposed to split. Detective (suspended) Yelich is happy to go searching, figuring there’s a chance to find her before she flees or someone finds her.

Francesco Marciuliano and Bret Blevins’s Judge Parker for the 4th of February 2024. So what do you think the big score Don made with Ann/Doris/Cheryl/a-name-to-be-named-later was? Do you think her nursing expertise was used for it?

Finding her at the train station is someone named Harrison, who’s angry about “Cheryl” and the money she owes him. She swears several times she’s saving to pay him back. His better idea is to go find this one house she visited while in this town “Cheryl” has no reason to visit, and get the money out of “old friend” Alan Parker. Yelich is close enough to find out about this abduction and warns Randy Parker to get his father out of there. Alan Parker refuses to leave, and Rene Belluso takes notes, wrong.

Next Week!

We got supernatural beings trapped on this side of the great beyond! We got Popeye trapped on the other side of the great bubble! Who will win? Emi Burdge and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye gets some attention next week, all going to plan.

What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Is Rene Belluso gone now? November 2023 – February 2024

I can’t imagine that Rene Belluso is gone from Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D.. While I sympathize with those who find the Wile E Coyote-like explosion of all his scams exhausting, I suspect that his is too good a bit of business to drop. At least not unless you have a more serious story to tell. And Beatty’s Glenwood is a gentle place. He may recede for a while, and I wouldn’t mind that as he’s had a lot of story lately. But I expect he’ll be back.

So this should catch you up to early February 2024 in Rex Morgan, M.D.. If you’re reading this after about May 2024, or news about the comic strip breaks, I’ll try to have something useful for you at this link. If I don’t, well, maybe I fell for one of Rene’s plots or I’m running late and need an extra day. We’ll see.

Rex Morgan, M.D..

12 November 2023 – 4 February 2024.

Rene Belluso, having tried his own “Mirakle Method” of personality fixing, had turned himself in to authorities as the first step in repairing his life. With the help of Mirakle Method Industries LLC chief promoter Buzzy Cameron, though, he got released from prison and joined Cameron and “Mud” Murphy’s tours on-stage. As Cameron points out, everyone loves a redemption story.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 5th of December, 2023. “How bad are you at promotion that you couldn’t sell self-esteem in the 70s? Were you even trying? … no, no, look, you’re okay, I’m okay, it’s all for the est.”

Meanwhile in a chance encounter Rex Morgan, M.D., finds himself doing some doctor work. His patient Lyle Ollman knows more specific Mirakle Method stuff than a guy who never heard of the thing should. It transpires that Ollman created the Mirakle Method, back in the 70s, as the Ollman Technique. But it didn’t catch on so how does anyone know about it now? Morgan advises Ollman to get a lawyer fast. Here, you can have one of his, out of petit-jury.

A couple weeks later, Cameron gets word from his lawyers about all this. He and Mud Murphy try to find Belluso, who’s fled their hotel. Ollman gets together with Cameron and Murphy and somebody’s lawyer and everyone agrees, you know, why mess up the money machine? Just give Ollman credit and royalties and everything’s cool. It is, perhaps, another case of Terry Beatty setting up an interesting conflict and then punting. But how would you feel if someone was willing to give you a dump truck full of money and in exchange you just have to let them?

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 27th of December, 2023. I don’t know how realistic that is. So for a test, I’d like if someone could reveal they’d turned something or other that I scribbled out back in, say, 2007 and went and turned it into an Oprah’s Book Club-grade bestseller and oops now they had huge ongoing royalties to deliver to me. Just to see what my reaction would be. So we can judge for realism.

New year, new start. Cameron and Murphy get Rex Morgan into one of their Glenwood Mirakle Method seminars, in gratitude to him for letting them take over his comic strip. Rene Belluso is there too, in disguise, and vows revenge on Morgan for however it is the good doctor has ruined his life again. As the seminar breaks up the scheming Belluso steps out into traffic and gets hit very hard by a car. A bright red one, too, the most dangerous kind. Fortunately, there happens to be a doctor in the strip.

Belluso makes it through, but he’s in a full-body cast. And doesn’t know whether to be more horrified that he’s stuck in that cast for six to eight weeks minimum or that he has Rex Morgan to thank for doctoring. And if that’s not enough Mud Murphy’s come to visit! The onetime hellion now worries sincerely for the person who, even if he was pulling a scam, helped him and maybe even other people. And hey, Murphy’s brought a special guest, Lyle Ollman, let’s give a big hand for —

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 28th of January, 2024. For the sake of avoiding confusion I figure to keep calling him Rene Belluso, among other things because barring extraordinary reason you should call someone by the name they pick themselves. Also, I’m not sure whether he’s Jimmy Ollman or some other last name. I feel like if Ollman were Rene’s uncle on his father’s side, he would have said “after my brother died”. But that’s not an unshakable hook to hang the question of Rene’s birth name on.

Rene’s uncle? Because Ollman recognizes the man in the cast as Jimmy, his long-lost nephew. Rene protests, over and over, and finally just asks Uncle Lyle to leave him be. No such luck, and Ollman insists on giving Belluso unquestioning acceptance and welcoming. You understand his terror.

And that’s the standings as of early February. What’s next?

Next Week!

It’s adventures in Milford! I look at Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp and see what’s up in that Gil-Mimi divorce and everything else going on. Catch you then, I’m hoping. Meanwhile, everyone, please be careful crossing the street. Those red cars are something else.

What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Rene Belluso didn’t really reform, did he? August – November 2023

Along the way to this week’s plot recap Rene Belluso, the old reliable miscreant of Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D., had a big emotional outburst, inspired by his own “Mirakle Method” of self-improvement and actualization and such. Is this the event that’s caused him to re-evaluate his life and become a respectable and less interesting member of story comics society?

Too soon to say. I appreciate that Terry Beatty likes to write a gentle strip where mostly good things happen. But it seems very consistent for Belluso to be putting on a pose to take advantage of people, in this case, because he’s stumbled across a great money-making opportunity. However, the first step of this involves turning himself in for various past scams. So he’s taking the pain first and leaving the reward for later. Belluso is the human world’s equivalent to Slick Smitty, yes, but it’s not like he gets his scams exactly backward.

Still, everyone in the strip who knows him is skeptical. I am too. We’ll see, though. If around February 2024 it turns out I was wholly right, or wholly wrong, you’ll likely see a mention of it here. And if any news about the comic strip breaks I’ll try to post it there, too. Meanwhile, let’s recap the last three months of Glenwood life.

Rex Morgan, M.D..

20 August – 12 November 2023.

Fergus “Mud” Murphy, reformed by Rene Belluso’s Mirakle Method self-help seminars, took his apology tour to Glenwood. The results were mixed. Truck Tyler told him to get out of his face, although Truck’s girlfriend Wanda suggested, you know, give the guy a chance.

Murphy accepted with grace one of life’s hard lessons, that you can’t force someone to accept your apology, but you gotta apologize anyway. His evening in the motel’s interrupted by Rene Belluso, “Professor Augustus Mirakle” himself. Fergus listed Professor Mirakle, Belluso’s most recent scam, as co-writer for “Swingset on the Moon”, the cornerstone of Murphy’s new career as children’s singer. And now he wants his money.

Murphy says that his agent, Buzzy Cameron — more on that later — has been holding Belluso’s share. He can write Belluso a check anytime he wants. And how is Belluso supposed to cash a check when he’s a wanted man? Well, the Mirakle Method might just help Belluso straighten out his life and get in good with the authorities.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 8th of September, 2023. Cameron mentions how he’s not sure how long he was in the trunk, which is an amusing way of acknowledging the loose relationship between reader and in-strip times. It then feeds into talking a lot about how bad Cameron’s shirt smells, which doesn’t get as many laughs from me as I think Beatty was hoping for.

Belluso sneers at this, because he knows: the Mirakle Method is just a heap of gibberish he put together to target self-help marks. Murphy’s insistence that the thing works doesn’t move him. What does move him is the prospect of money. What he hopes will move Murphy is doing something really stupid, like kidnapping agent Buzzy Cameron.

Cameron and Murphy agree to Belluso’s demand they withdraw, in cash, enough from Murphy’s accounts to cover his royalties. While waiting for the bank to open, the two nag Belluso into trying out his own Mirakle Method and see if he can’t get his head on straight. It takes a whole minute for Belluso to break down, sobbing, having discovered his Daddy Issues and mourning that he hit on a real, legitimate therapy but wasted it treating it like a scam.

So Cameron and Murphy offer a deal with, they somehow believe, the reformed Rene Belluso. If he’ll give permission to use the Mirakle Method they’ll sell it, and he can collect royalties, ready for him once he’s out of prison for whatever the heck it was he was wanted for exactly. Oh, trying to shove Hank Harwood Jr off a CRUISE SHIP. Right.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 21st of September, 2023. He seems sincere.

Well, they make the deal, bonding over how they’ve all done prison time. Murphy for general rowdiness. Cameron for tax evasion, and I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over the Approaching Plot Point klaxon. There, got it cleared. Belluso goes to jail in an event worthy of extended coverage on the local news. The Harwoods and the Morgans both react with wonder and doubt that this could ever be legit.

Still, the long night ended, Murphy and Cameron head out again and run into Rex Morgan, M.D., who’s startled by the apology he gets. And Truck Tyler, enjoying his 18th hour on that same cup of coffee, says Wanda’s talked him into doing something with Murphy’s cartoon thingy. Ah, but the cartoon thingy is on hold. Murphy and Cameron — who’d like to represent Tyler, if he’s willing, which he’s not — have an infomercial to make.

Some indefinite time later, after Mud Murphy’s run for mayor of Cavelton, the Morgans come across Murphy’s infomercial. It runs complete with Belluso confessing that he created the system as a scam but discovered it actually helped people. Despite it being an extremely long commercial, and having had enough of Rene Belluso, they watch the entirety. June, like everyone else, can’t believe this. Rex concedes that it’s probably not illegal, since they don’t seem to be selling anything besides feel-good speeches, and maybe it can do someone some good. He wouldn’t pay for a session, though it seems a lot of other people would.

And that’s where we stand in mid-November 2023.

Next Week!

My greatest narrative recap challenge: Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp gets its innings, so I get to figure out how to explain three months’ worth of that. Watch me as I accidentally say I have to take an extra three days to write this all out!

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why did the crook warehouse burn down? July – September 2023

Leech Madsen set it on fire. The recently-concluded story in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy climaxed, in part, with a fire at the telemarketing scam shop that the schizophrenic Audie runs. It starts in the server room. Madsen seems to have started the fire and then go to shake down Audie for the rest of the money to be had. This seems like a poor plan to me, as Madsen went and got lost in the chaos of the fire. But we have to allow even villains blackmailing other villains to sometimes make bad decisions.

Hope you enjoy catching up to early October, now. If you’re reading around December, I expect to have my next Dick Tracy plot recap done. That essay, and all my Dick Tracy recaps, should be at this link. And now, the story.

Dick Tracy.

9 July – 30 September.

Sprocket “Susan” Nitrate, onetime film scammer turned girlfriend of author Adam Austin, had a temp job working for a telemarketing scam firm. The boss, Audie, who keeps having movie-quote conversations with imaginary figures, has other stuff going on. He’d sent ‘Leech’ Madsen to pay off Anders, the guy who’d been supplying stolen telecommunications equipment. Madsen shot him, instead, and pocketed the payoff. And figures to get back to Audie and collect his own payoff too.

From there, though, we have a surprisingly direct plot. Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem hit up their street sources, looking for places that might be housing a suspicious lot of activity. This leads them to a recently-evacuated warehouse, the spot where Audie set up before moving above the TV station, the only other working building in the neighborhood. They also check security camera footage, good detective work that leads nowhere.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 9th of August, 2023. An aspect of this story I like is that Susan/Sprocket’s an experienced enough hand at this that everybody recognizes she should be let to run things, especially in an emergency. It’s a subtle beat of how authority will break free of formal structure.

Anders, in the hospital, recovers enough to start naming names. The cops announce their lead on the shooting to the press. This gives Sabrina, the boss’s right-hand competent person, the tip-off to evacuate. And Susan discovers another reason to evacuate: the server room is on fire! And, more, Madsen is back, holding a gun on Audie. It’s all a big confusing mess. Madsen flees, but in the smoke and confusion ends up running into Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem. Madsen keeps on fleeing, eventually running into the Abandoned Blade Runner Building. Worse, the floor he climbs to collapses. He’s lucky to not fall directly onto a heap of concrete blocks and wood shards and rebar, but because he lands in a great heap of pigeon droppings.

Meanwhile, the fire. Susan (remember her?) oversees evacuating the telemarketing lair. And she leads Sabrina and Audie through the sewers finding, in the end, an abandoned lair with power and water. They thank her; Susan promises to not remember her at all.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 23rd of August, 2023. Also an interesting beat: Susan gets away with her part in this scam. She’s among the few Dick Tracy villains to get away with it, and to have no obvious reason why she wouldn’t continue to. (The Pouch is the other one who comes to mind. He got away with using a popcorn maker to shoot a guy, back in the 70s, so he’s probably escaped justice? We’ll see.)

After a heck of a day at work Susan returns to her and Adam’s hotel room. Adam’s book contract thingy went well, and he’s ready to take an overseas vacation. Susan, equipped with a fresh forged passport, is ready to go too. The story comes to its happy end the 16th of September.

Although that was after a 15-day pause for another Minit Mystery. From the 27th of August guest writer Eric Costello and guest artist Mike Sagara told a little puzzle about a murder of a Knights baseball player at Weeghman Park. Get the references?

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The current story started the 17th of September and it’s looking like a nice little murder mystery. Someone killed Wilhelmina Caxton, yet another friend of the mayor’s, so you know there’s pressure to get answers quickly. No sign of forced entry, no sign of struggle, just stab wounds to the chest. Missing: a late 13th century manuscript.

Also dead: Dr Aldus Manutius of the Pfister Institute, who hadn’t been seen in eleven months or so but you know how these Institutes are, everyone figured he was busy on something or other. He’s also dead by stabbing. He had been cataloguing medieval manuscripts, last anyone saw him. And that’s what we know for now.

Next Week!

What is Wales going to do with all these Saxon invaders? Also, can we maybe use the seas to feed people? I check out Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant if all goes to plan.

What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Wait, is Sally Scorpius an established character? May – July 2023

I don’t know. The current Mark Trail story has Mark Trail’s father recognize an elderly woman. Mark Trail’s father is loosely a representative of pre-Jules-Rivera continuity Mark Trail. So does a character that he recognizes from the 70s represent someone from some story I never heard of in like 1978 or something? And I don’t know. I haven’t seen anyone calling out the easter egg, at least.

Also, being more loose about this, Mark Trail’s father has been presented as, roughly, the Jack Elrod-era Mark Trail. Mark Trail’s grandfather has been the soft-reboot representation of the Ed Dodd-era character, and Dodd wrote the strip until … well, 1978. So if you were to tell me this is a 45-year-deep pull, I would believe you, but I have no way of confirming.

Whatever else this may be, though, it should bring you up to speed on the comic strip for early August, 2023. All my essays about Mark Trail should be gathered at this link, including more up-to-date plot recaps if you’re reading this after about October 2023. And now, let’s see if I can remember what was happening last time I checked in on…

Mark Trail.

7 May – 30 July 2023.

Jebediah Jeter had returned from the leprechaun kingdom with wild claims about bears and the Water Bear Country range. The bear claim: they’re his friends! The Water Bear Country claim: that the whole shoddily-run, preposterously dangerous ranch is Sid Stump’s way to nag investors into squandering money on AI content generation.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 11th of May, 2023. Also, like, you’re probably hip-deep in raccoons and I’ll just say it. Getting mauled by raccoons is not going to help you in your quest to get mauled by bears. There.

It’s a dumb plan but Sid Stump, tech bro, has in fact a dumber one. He’s of the idea that you can’t be great unless you exert your dominion over Nature. You know, like by fighting bears. So the whole camp is shoddy and badly-run because you have to overcome enormous amounts of common sense to draw bears in. In the absence of both bears and the common sense that God bestowed upon gravel, Sid will fight Mark Trail. Mark Trail is up for fighting back too, until an angry mother bear breaks things up. Jebediah Jeter, journalist, insists it’s his friend Millie the Bear. Millie the Bear insists they’re not friends. They exit, provided cover by Andy the St Bernard.

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With the 22nd of May Mark Trail gets back home and summarizes the whole scheme and scam. And, hey, the wounded Professor Bee Sharp picks up a job advertising railroad safety for transport tycoon Chet Chedderson. Hold that thought. Keep holding it; I’m surprised he hasn’t turned up again yet, but the story isn’t over.

As has often happened, Cherry Trail gets her own storyline, told one week out of every three. Her local concern is that bee colony rescued from the statue of The Forest Pioneer. It’s suffering colony collapse disorder, caused by (we learn this week) Varroa mites. She needs something to take her mind off the sad news. To her regret, she gets it.

That starts with a call from Mark’s no-longer-estranged father, Mark ”Happy” Trail, who wants to take his son fishing. I need hardly tell you all the role promised fishing trips serve in Mark Trail. Happy Trail wants to go to a father-son fishing event. And he wants to go by railroad. He’s got travel points! You have a relative like this too. Tragically, the United States hasn’t had passenger railroad service since 1948. While waiting for a dead engine to get replaced Happy Trail reveals the true purpose of the trip. The lodge was to present an award honoring Mark’s grandfather, Mark “Forrest” Trail, muckraking environmental journalist who set the Trail family legacy.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 22nd of June, 2023. Comics Kingdom’s Vintage Mark Trail has reached the 1970s. Right now it’s telling the story of Tobey and Tillie Beaver, from 1973. I’m eager to see if there are actual instances of Mark Trail with sideburns in some wonderful attempt to update the character. Also in the previous story Mark Trail — Forrest Trail, I guess — out-competed a logger in a logging contest and accidentally broke a kid’s leg, setting up a reconciliation between the kid and his father who doesn’t see why he should play guitar.

Still, it’s a nice chance to bond over family lore. And, at a scheduled stop, see a train explosion up ahead. It is, yes, a take on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this year. This all way down to the train carrying a load of vinyl chloride and that the authorities set the derailed train on fire. This report comes from stunt-driver-turned-animal-wrangler Rex Scorpius, who’s in town visiting his mother.

The Trails get some cell phone footage of the fire. Transit cops demand the phone, so Mark Trail throws them his detachable tail (it’ll regrow in weeks) as a distraction and flees. They figure to ask some hard questions of State Senator Sam Smalls, who’s happy to take questions about how awesome he is. Mark Trail asks a slightly undergrad-newspaper-y question that amounts to “will you admit to covering up the scandal now or wait till you get home?” The Senator — I’m not clear whether state or federal — orders Mark Trail arrested for trying to instigate a riot. Happy and Mark Trail fight their way out of custody, and into the waiting car of accomplices-after-the-fact Rex Scorpius and his mother.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 22nd of July, 2023. Here I have to say, I can imagine getting how Mark Trail escaped trouble with the Miami coastal police when he crashed his father’s speedboat. Plausibly only his father could identify him, and he wasn’t up for pressing charges. Here, though? I mean, Happy Trail has granola-and-pet-food-empire money. But money only helps you get out of trouble if you’re in trouble for hurting poor people. It’s less effective on senators and their security detail.

Well, Rex, an experienced stunt driver, out-drives the cops. In fact, since his mother was a stunt driver in the 70s, he can jump the car over an incomplete bridge like he was on a dumb action-comedy show at 9 pm on a Friday night. Still not sure how this is going to keep them out of jail. Guess we’ll see.

Sunday Animals Watch!

• Eastern Box Turtles, 7 May 2023.
• Injured Animals, 14 May 2023.
• Mallards, 21 May 2023.
• Ghost Fishing, 28 May 2023.
• Jellyfish, 4 June 2023.
• Bees, 11 June 2023.
• Wildlife Railroad Crossings, 18 June 2023.
• Atlantic Killfish, 25 June 2023.
• Dogs in Summer, 2 July 2023.
• The Oregon Whale Detonation, 9 July 2023. (??? Yeah, I don’t get this one either. It hasn’t got anything to do with the storyline and it’s not close to the anniversary of the event.)
• Pink Dye, 16 July 2023.
• Vinyl Chloride, 23 July 2023.
• Varroa Mites, 30 July 2023.

Next Week!

It’s a rich blend of platitudes and pet endangerment as I look at Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. So you may want to be ready early in case either of those are likely to disturb your recreational reading.

What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why is Mumbles back in jail? April – July 2023

In late May Dick Tracy spent a week focusing on Silver Nitrate. We saw many old Tracy villains in the background as Silver narrated for the audience. One of them was Mumbles, whom we last saw out and hanging around a furry convention. It’s not clear why he’s in jail; we haven’t seen anything he’d done. I think the least bad reconciliation of these facts is supposing the panel is recollections. That it’s not the present immediate situation. But maybe Mumbles is up to stuff we haven’t heard about, too. [ Confidential to C.L.: ping me about this. ]

This should get you up to speed for mid-July 2023 in Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If any news about the strip develops, or if you’re reading this after about September 2023, this link should have a more useful summary. If you’re reading this around mid-July 2023, this should be enough of a summary for you.

Dick Tracy.

16 April – 8 July 2023.

Last time in Tracey Town, the new villain Gameboy was on the loose. He’s a game-themed villain committing the most archetypical supervillain crime: themed property theft. Special guest star That Guy From Pawn Stars has an idea what Gameboy’s next target will be. The target is … a printer’s proof of the 1930s promotional giveaway map for a then-new-time radio show. It seems off-theme. “Shouldn’t this be a story Jim Scancarelli puts into Gasoline Alley?” asks Tracy. Ah, no, Pawn Star Guy explains. Jim Scancarelli would just have the old-time-radio characters show up. Tracy tugs his collar loose and makes an embarrassed ‘glurk’ noise before saying, “Let’s explore that some time that’s not now”.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 23rd of April, 2023. This particular strip is about making sure B.O.Plenty and Chick Tracy’s appearance later in the story doesn’t come form nowhere. But there is possibly another story setup being done here. Simmons Corners was the setting for the Li’l Orphan Annie radio series, as you surely inferred from Gameboy’s note. The ap was a real one, printed in 1936. But in the Dick Tracy continuity Little Orphan Annie isn’t a once-popular comic strip/radio/musicals star. And, as you can see, the real map has drawings of Annie and Sandy that we don’t get a clear look at in the comic. I don’t know how this is to be reconciled; the easy supposition is that the Dick Tracy universe map is about an Annie-like character who filled her pop culture niche. But it could be stranger than that. I don’t know the story; I don’t get scoops on comic strip news.

The map is going to be at the Metro Toy Faire, and it’s rare, so why not? Well, someone in a Gameboy mask crashes the Faire, stealing a nothing game. While everyone’s distracted someone else makes off with the old-time-radio map. Gameboy’s got to have a hobby, you know.

Meanwhile, B.O.Plenty is back in the story. He’s got a hen, Chick Tracy, who’s lined up for a modeling job for Chic’N De-Lites. She’s a clever chicken, able to do tricks and be photogenic. More on this to come.

The Chief has an idea for Gameboy’s next target. It’s a World War II prisoner-of-war edition of Monopoly. These were sets made with secret compartments holding files, compasses, silk maps, and foreign currency to aid escapes. The Chief claimed the Red Cross distributed them. He’s wrong, but in an understandable way. I’ve read pop histories mentioning the games and making the same claim. (I would have sworn it was in this history of the Parker Brothers I read once, but I can’t find the book again.) Other aid organizations, custom-created for the purpose, distributed them. This way if discovered the useful service of a true neutral organization could go on.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 12th of May, 2023. We never get, by the way, a definite statement about whether Gameboy had legitimately turned the Milton-Bradley ‘Time Bomb’ toy into an actual toy or whether he was bluffing. I feel sure the elderly man observing ‘Oh look! A time bomb!’ is referencing something, but I’m not sure what. The closest match to my mind is the bit in Doonesbury where an elderly Cambodian couple testifies that the war criminals Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s “secret” bombs were no secret: “Look honey, here come the bombs” he said. Still, there is something Jay Ward about this man’s declaration.

The Chief’s instincts are right; Gameboy can’t resist the target. While another fake Gameboy steals a cheap game loudly, the real Gameboy reveals what he claims to be a real bomb. Luckily, Chick Tracy — there for a promotional stunt — mistakes the bomb for a toy and tugs the string that deactivates it. Gameboy’s captured and all is well.

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The 14th of May starts a weeklong diversion. The rarebit fiend Dick Tracy has an adventure with Fearless Fosdick, his parody from Li’l Abner. It’s a reference many commenters didn’t recognize. GoComics needs to expand its selection of Li’l Abner strips to repeat.

The current story starts the 22nd of May, with Silver Nitrate narrating his and his sister’s backstory. They were making film forgeries. Last time they were out, Sprocket escaped, taking on a new life as “Susan Keats”, girlfriend of novelist Adam Austin. Sprocket is thinking of taking a temp job at a place that claims it won’t mind her barefoot-everywhere in-touch-with-mother-Earth vibe. (I don’t know whether Adam Austin knows about Susan’s past.)

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 7th of June, 2023. I’m not sure that Susan’s talk here is that good, but it is an economic way of showing that she can talk people past their immediate concern, needed for any sales position. Also, I mean, she’s being considered for a telemarketing scam organization. The actual bar is likely “doesn’t blurt out ‘I love my job at the FTC!’ during the interview”.

What the job is, is telephone scams. But she’s good at that — it’s not far off the work she and Silver used to do — and her supervisor seems nice. And the boss, Audie, is always wandering around quoting old movies at nobody in particular. So she’s working for an Internet nerd, though mediated by a human.

And then storylines intersect! It turns out the scammers are targeting B.O.Plenty and his wife Gertie pretty hard. Only the intervention of Chick Tracy can stop them falling for every call. Tracy agrees to tap the Plentys’ line and see if they can figure something out.

Which, with the aid of detection, they do! In what is unmistakably an act of scientific detection, Tracy finds a distributor who reported a hijacked shipment of telecommunications gear and a would-be recipient who didn’t. They ask the shipper for information on the buyer. They’re barely out of the office when the manager, Mr Anders, calls someone to say Tracy’s on to them and he’s got to get away. Tracy and Sam Catchem can barely find the false address of the “buyer” before Anders is found murdered.

And in another unmistakable act of super-detection, Tracy searches Anders’s office and finds … a bit of shaped stucco. Now where in town is there old shaped stucco? Well, the Nomar shopping area, built around fifty years ago, during the great Art Deco era of the … early 70s. They prowl the area. They can’t find which of the many buildings in the neighborhood is missing a thumb-size chunk of stucco. But Anders’s murderer, Madsen, sees them prowling and thinks they’re on to him.

Mike Curtis and Shelley Pleger’s Dick Tracy for the 6th of July, 2023. And a note to head off future confusion: Madsen here is lying. He shot Anders dead and, I assume, kept the payoff. That’s what we’re seeing the gun for. Yes, I know this is a lot of “unreliable” narration this recap — Madsen lying about what he did, possibly Silver Nitrate having a montage rather than interacting with something in the present, possibly Gameboy faking a bomb — but Madsen we at least that he’s lying and have a good idea why.

Madsen meets up with Audie, claiming to have paid off Anders and that, once Audie pays him off, he’ll be out for good. No links for the cops to find. Audie says he doesn’t have that in petty cash, he used it all to pay Anders to get out of town. And, meanwhile, Sprocket/Susan is figuring she’ll be out of here in a few days, when Austin’s book business meetings get done.

And in a weeklong interlude starting the 12th of June, Diet Smith discovers a Space Coupe in his backyard. He shouldn’t have one; his was lost somewhere in deep space when a couple guys hijacked it, and he doesn’t have plans to build another. It’s a gift from the Moon Governor. Smith asks Tracy if he knows where the Lunarians are. Tracy doesn’t answer.

There was also a single-day strip, tagged with a note to expect next year a story about Little Orphan Annie’s parents. I’m surprised there are still open mysteries about her parents. But I trust Mike Curtis’s understanding of the canonical Annie.

Next Week!

Prince Valiant and his son join together on an adventure into Wales to find out: what’s the deal here, anyway? I get a week of plot recaps even I can’t be late on as I review Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant, if all goes to plan.

What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Why is this leprechaun guy in Mark Trail? February – May 2023

The last few days in Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail have introduced us to Jebediah Jeter. He’s a journalist who went missing while investigating a nature retreat. Rather than being attacked by bears, though, he claims to have befriended them. He seems to be going through some stuff.

So this should catch you up to early May 2023 in the comic strip. If you’re reading this after about August 2023, or news about Mark Trail comes out, I should have a more useful essay here. For now, back to the Lost Forest Non-Municipal Area.

Mark Trail.

12 February – 7 May 2023.

Last time I figured Mark Trail was going to do a story about the alligators in the Lost Forest. So did Mark. Bill Ellis vetoed the story, though, figuring nobody would care unless Mark Trail got eaten by alligators or something cool like that. But he does have another story, one within commuting range. Water Bear Country is this place for rich STEM idiots to reconnect with nature. But True Tech Magazine reporter Jebediah Jeter’s vanished from it. True Tech’s editor thinks he was attacked by a water bear. Mark Trail concedes the possibility but that such an attack would not be a big deal.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 21st of April, 2023. I, too, appreciate Cherry’s desire to be precise about the matter. And tha she wants to be intellectually honest enough about her answer not to just blame the disaster on the concrete driveway she hates.

Back to that in a moment. I’d like to outline the Cherry Trail story, which gets to another round of conflict with Honest Ernest over the Sunny Soleil Garden Society. He’s planning to pave over the garden outside the clubhouse. Society president Violet Cheshire is all for this too. Ernest’s (ex?-)wife Caroline wants nothing to do with him, and poured his homemade lawn toxin sideline down the drain. So now he’s into paving. Violet Cheshire won’t hear any arguments against the parking lot, and all Cherry Trail can do is salvage some rose bushes ahead of the concrete pour.

Then comes the rain pour. A heavy but not exceptional storm rolls through and with the soft, absorbent ground gone, the water rolls into Violet Cheshire’s office. She’s not happy about that, either, but what are you going to do? Think about how we get rain sometimes?

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Back to Water Bear Country. Mark Trail can’t get anyone to say they understand that “water bears”, tardigrades, are microorganisms remarkable for their hardiness and incapable of threatening a human. He does get a greeting from Water Bear Country Retreat organizer and AI writing/art scammer Simon Stump. And he gets to meet the current set of campers. Re-meet, most of them: there’s people like ‘Cricket Bro’ Rob Bettancourt that he’d like to punch. Or Professor Bee Sharp, whose punching is less necessary. There’s also a lifestyle influencer named Holly Folly he doesn’t know anything about.

This gang goes off on a nature hike. Mark Trail figures it’s a good chance to find out why there might be macroscopic bear problems in the village. Possible causes? Lots of food left in attended dumpsters. He can barely consider what this means for park management when Holly Folly runs in calling for help. The trail collapsed and Cricket Bro and Bee Sharp fell down the ravine. Mark Trail drives home and picks up Andy and a cart to wheel Bee Sharp back up.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 23rd of March, 2023. I love the little hearts floating around Holly Folly and Andy in the second panel there. This may also be a good spot for a discussion question. Does it work that we don’t have any knowledge of Holly Folly’s problems before Mark Trail announces they exist? In structure it’s a deus ex machina, a thing not set up in the story that gets Mark Trail to the next point. But it’s something she has reason not to bring up, and that Mark Trail has reason not to bother looking at until he’s gotten this clue about Bee Sharp. So is that fair?

The camp’s emergency plan is to point and say, “Look, a big, distracting thing!” before Stump explains journalists are smug and he’s going to destroy them. So Mark Trail gets his own first aid kit, and drives Sharp to the hospital himself.

Mark Trail doesn’t relish telling Rusty that his favorite science guy has a broken leg. Rusty doesn’t care, though; he’s declared Bee Sharp “cancelled”. This because of a video where Sharp claimed hippos were closely related to pigs. This is something you could find in any pop nature book a generation ago but which has turned out to be wrong. (Other things to catch the Old Pop Nature writer? Skunks aren’t mustelids, and red pandas aren’t in the raccoon family.) Rusty Trail embarrassed himself in class repeating Sharp’s mistake uncritically. And when Sharp wouldn’t even issue a retraction? It seems harsh, but we have to hold our science popularizers to standards.

This is the clue Mark Trail needed. Professor Bee Sharp’s in that credibility deathspiral where middle schoolers say mean stuff about him. The Bettancourts have been losing all their money from their NFT and crypto scams turning out to be scams. Holly Folly’s facing a workplace lawsuit. Almost everyone at the camp is broke. But what does that mean? Does it relate to Jebediah Jeter’s disappearance?

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 28th of April, 2023. What could be wacky about a guy named ‘Jebediah Jones’, a name which doesn’t sound at all like a character Conan O’Brien had on to introduce the next show’s guests from 2004 to 2006? … And it has struck me that “Jebediah Jones” and “Holly Folly” are self-consciously silly names in a way that, like, “Rob Bettancourt” or even “Professor Bee Sharp” aren’t. Even “Chet Chedderson”, the shipping magnate who’s the only person at the camp with actual money has a slightly goofy name. This isn’t a novel thing for the strip, as see Kelly Welly. I wonder if it’s an attempt to consciously make the temporary and minor characters more preposterous and therefore easier to remember.

Luckily, Jebediah Jeter pops right up and shares his story. He was digging around Stump’s office and, he thinks, got too close to the truth. So “they” — Stump and I’m not sure who — marched him off into the night to fight with a bear. He fled, and so did the bear. And … they became friends, all right. But what’s the truth Jeter got too close to?

Sid Stump plans to unleash AI automatic content generation on the world. He’s running the camp as a way to get investor money. But the camp is shoddily run — the cliffs were ruled unstable years ago, and haven’t got any better — and everyone coming to the camp is themselves looking for money. But even if they succeed … AI automatic content generation sucks. It writes plausible-sounding nonsense, because STEM idiots don’t know what epistemology is or how to get one. Mark Trail offers Jeter what he’s most needed — a ride to safety — but it may be too late. He’s led Sid Stump to Jeter.

And that’s our cliffhanger, at least until the cliff collapses out from under us.

Sunday Animals Watch!

The past several months have leaned into the interpretation of Sunday strips as slices of Mark Trail’s articles. He even mentions needing to write about tardigrades a few days before they turned up in the Sunday strip. So I guess here’s a listicle of Mark Trail writing for you:

• Iguanas, 12 February 2023.
• Wolves and why there aren’t “Alpha Wolves”, 19 February 2023.
• Tardigrades, 26 February 2023.
• Great Horned Owls, 5 March 2023.
• Wind Storm Safety, 19 March 2023. (Mark Trail recommends it.)
• Bears and trash safety, 26 March 2023. (Mark Trail recommends both.)
• Monarch Butterflies, 26 March 2023.
• Concrete, 2 April 2023.
• Saint Bernard dogs, 9 April 2023.
• Hippopotamuses, 16 April 2023.
• Sargassum Wave, 23 April 2023.
• Spadefoot Toads, 30 April 2023.
• Eastern Box Turtles, 6 May 2023.

Next Week!

The course of true love never runs straight, but will it run through volunteer work at the animal clinic? How about through Pet Yoga? And most important, has Dr Jeff bought his own CRUISE SHIP All this and Wilbur at Karaoke, too, as we look at Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth in around a week.

What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Is the Mark Trail writing changing again? June – August 2022

I’m aware Jules Rivera’s tenure on Mark Trail hasn’t been to everyone’s tastes. The more cartoony art style, and the soft reboot of the characters, hasn’t worked for many. That characters and, especially, the narrator lean in to delivering jokes more has also bothered some. They liked the strip more when it was square.

So I’m taking my preface to point out something that’s grown more prominent the last few months. And that is that the writing — as in, the words on the page — is becoming more square again. The stories haven’t changed, particularly in running separate Mark and Cherry stories. But we’re seeing Mark Trail say things like “Holy guacamole! Rex handled those Canada geese well! He’s sure got a way with animals.” Or “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Cricket Bro is locked in the EUV! We have to get him out!” We’re also seeing more exaggerated reaction poses for individual characters. And minor character names that are more on the nose, like “Jimmy Songbird” the keytar player.

It’s a return to a more stodgy, slightly off mode of your classic Jack Elrod narrative. It’s not a complete reversion. For one, I feel Rivera is doing this as deliberate effect; Elrod, my sense is, just wrote like that. Mark Trail continues his new habit of internalized thoughts. Sometimes he even says things without exclamation points.

I imagine someone who can’t stand Rivera’s style will not be moved by this observation. But, for those who aren’t sure? You might enjoy the comic strip more if you’re cued to look for it.

This should catch you up to late August 2022 in the Mark Trail story. If you’re reading this after about November 2022, or news about the comic strip comes out, there should be a more useful essay here. Also, on my other blog, I looked at a couple comic strips for their mathematical themes. Hope you enjoy.

Mark Trail.

12 June – 28 August 2022.

Professor Bee Sharp had rushed the DJ’s booth, at the Bettancourt’s NFT scam launch party. He talked the DJ into playing his tracks. These turned his investigations into “Cricket Bro” Rob and “Crypto Bro” Sterling Bettancourt into EDM. The revelation? The NFTs are a scam and the crypto is worthless garbage. Really, uh, caught me off-guard with that fast-breaking Zontar story there, Floyd.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 20th of June, 2022. In before the weird T-6000 fanboys explain it’s perfectly normal for cars to lock up and catch on fire after a low-speed crash into a tree.

Rob is angered by the EDM lyrics, and also the revelation that EDM has lyrics. He charges at Mark Trail and Bee Sharp using the only weapon at hand, his Electric Utility Vehicle. He crashes immediately into a tree, and the car locks up and catches fire. The two smash open the car’s windshield and drag an angry Rob out. The crash starts a wildfire, though. The partygoers evacuate, and leave the area. But not before a piece of the half-pipe built for the event falls on Rusty Trail. Rusty calls for help, and sees what he believes to be the Seaside Specter. We don’t see what happens, or what he “really” saw. We see him reunited with his parents, safe and sound, though.

The wildfire doesn’t grow much, and the local fire authorities credit our friend the beaver. Beaver dams around the location kept the local area moist, limiting the fire’s spread. Oregon Fish and Wildlife wants to talk with the Bettancourts, but they’ve fled to California. And, with Happy Trail considering whether he can sell flame-roasted cricket protein bars, the story comes to a natural end, the 2nd of July.

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The current stories began the 4th of July. There are two pieces, as has become traditional, one following Cherry Trail and one following Mark Trail. I’ll recap Cherry Trail’s first.

Her father, Doc Davis, asks for help at the veterinary clinic. There’s all kinds of animals suffering allergic reactions or chemical burns. It looks like pesticide poisoning, but that’s not usually this serious. And it becomes personal for the Trails, as Sassy, their other dog that I forgot about too gets the same rash. Mark Trail figures it’s some kind of weed killer, but who’s using such strong weed killer out here in the Lost Forest?

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 5th of August, 2022. I’m not sure about this home-brewed toxin stuff, but I do respect anyone in the year 2022 who’s out making “libations”.

I mean, it’s the Sunny Soleil Society. We all knew that going in, but how they’re responsible takes time to reveal itself. Early August, reader time, we get that. Violet Cheshire wants that big mass of native plants ripped out to make a proper lawn, for the teatime garden. And she’s hired Honest Ernest, bug exterminator, to do it. He’s got a great new compound “of my own creation” to control weeds and insects. That “thud” you heard was the jaws of everybody at the EPA and FDA hitting the floor. Ernest is happy to give Cherry a sample, though, and she takes it back to Doc to test how corrosive it is. It quickly dissolves away the dirt on a penny, then the penny, then the pan the penny’s in, the table, the floor, the basement, and five feet of Piedmont anorthosite underneath. And that’s how far that story’s gotten.

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The 14th of July saw Mark Trail’s story split off from Cherry’s. Bill Ellis offers a choice of stories. One is tracking a rampaging elephant reported in four states. The other is for Teen Girl Sparkle, and it’s about a New Age healing center with an animal-therapy focus. Mark Trail picks the boring safe one, and we get Amy Lee back in the strip. She explains how it’s not so much a healing center as a roadside zoo. But he’ll be working with celebrity stunt driver-turned-Bikbok animal wrangler Rex Scorpius. Also, the New Age resort may be some kind of tiger cult, you know how these things go.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 28th of July, 2022. I don’t know, the tiger seems quite comfortable with it.

On scene in Houston Mark Trail meets up with … Diana Daggers again! She’s working with Rex Scorpius as he’s not doing NFT/crypto scam money. Also, hey, she was in Raccoon Rangers with Amy Lee. She’s where Lee got the idea of pitching this job to Mark Trail. She wanted Mark Trail because she believes Rex Scorpius is in real danger. Not so much physical danger, as emotional. He’s been going through some major stuff and guys like him get sucked into cults like this.

It’s happened before. She mentions how a couple years ago one of her stars had a mental break. He’d left town to film a movie in a lost forest and vanished. This sure seems to refer to James Allen’s final, abandoned, story for Mark Trail. In that story bad-boy action hero Jeremy Cartwright comes to Lost Forest to be kind of a jerk. If this is Jeremy Cartwright, he’s gone off to a Naturalist cult in Mendocino County so I guess we don’t need to worry about him anymore.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 17th of August, 2022. Oh, yeah, for some reason Mark Trail decided to go to this Texas cult dressed in what he thinks of as cowboy garb.

Mark Trail’s first meeting with Rex Scorpius goes well enough. He’s filming an episode about removing Canada geese from the yard of famed keytar musician Jimmy Songbird. Removing Canada geese is the stuff for professionals and … I guess Rex Scorpius is one, or brought in experts for his show, as that goes well enough. Mark Trail tries to catch up with Rex and ask about his secret, but Rex has to get to bed and to the gym. Anything to spend time not with other people. I get that.

And that’s about as far as that story’s gotten. We’re not yet to the tiger cult. I trust this will all play out in the next eleven weeks, by the time I get back to recapping Mark Trail plots.

Sunday Animals Watch!

• Spiders, 12 June 2022. With advice about how to get more spiders!
• Native-Plant Lawns, 19 June 2022. This is where that smug friend showing a picture of a yard that’s covered in what turn out to be invasive Siberian wheats got their idea.
• Goats, 26 June 2022. They can mow lawns and chew on lab coats!
• Bald Eagles, 3 July 2022. Remember when we almost killed them all? Glad we’re not trying to that anymore … right?
• Turtles, 10 July 2022. Don’t mess up their work. They’re busy defeating Shredder and the whole Foot Clan for us.
• Wildfires, 17 July 2022. Let’s stop setting them, OK? Think we can do that a little?
• Sea Turtles, 24 July 2022. Could we stop making their lives harder than they need to be too?
• De-Pavement, 31 July 2022. Turns out having soil and plants and trees and stuff is good even for cities.
• Rabbits and Hares, 7 August 2022. Which ones are the clever ones, and which are the ones that are full of tricks?
• Sharks, 14 August 2022. Are we making their lives harder than they need to be too? Why do we keep doing this?
• Canada Geese, 21 August 2022. Just … like … don’t start with them. Oof.
• Scorpions, 28 August 2022. Don’t start anything with them, they won’t start anything with you. Check your boots.

Next Week!

Is another member of the Weston clan making a complete mess of their lives? Why yes they are! Are we getting dubious-to-bad relationship advice passed off as somehow acceptable? Hoo yeah. It’s all sorts of cautionary tales in Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth, next week, if all goes well.

What’s Going On In Mark Trail? What is Bee Sharp’s Deal? March – June 2022

Professor Bee Sharp is, in Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail continuity, some manner of pop scientist. Rusty Trail’s a big fan. They’ve had a couple of interactions. Most have been centered around “Cricket Bro” Rob Bettancourt, childhood nemesis of Mark Trail.

We’ve been seeing more of Bee Sharp since his lab coat got chewed up by goats, part of Bettancourt’s NFT-minting scam. This story, Bee Sharp’s appeared a couple times. Once was in giving Rusty Trail some advice about seeking out cryptids. Another has been to reveal that Bettancourt’s current big NFT scam is, in fact, a scam, to a bunch of the people Bettncourt’s been scamming.

The effect (and I don’t know how much of this is Rivera’s intent) is Bee Sharp seems to have a deal rather like Mark Trail’s. That is, that he’s going about having adventures in bringing nature, or maybe science, to the public, and fighting evildoers. But also being much more successful in getting to be Internet Famous and all. Kelly Welly has a similar life, in Rivera’s telling, doing nature reporting stuff to greater acclaim than Mark Trail does. It makes good storytelling sense to have Mark Trail be the underdog even in his own field. And having several rivals opens more possibilities, although so far, Kelly Welly’s barely featured.

This should catch you up to mid-June 2022 in the comic strip. If any news about Mark Trail breaks, or if you’re reading this after about September 2022, you may find a more useful article here. And now to the strip.

Mark Trail.

27 March – 12 June 2022.

Mark Trail and family are in Oregon! For Rusty, it’s the chance to try and catch the Seaside Specter, a kind of aquatic Bigfoot. With the guidance of a graphic novel about another cryptid, the “Surfsquatch”, he goes looking and mostly scares himself. Professor Bee Sharp happens to be at the comic book shop, and offers some advice. (One senses Sharp, like many of a particular nerd genre could not get enough of cryptids before growing up. I bet he wanted Cecil Adams to explain the 17/23 Correlation too.) If the Seaside Specter is covered in seaweed, as reports say, he’s likely to be near salt water. If he feeds at night, as reports say, he needs protein. Surfsquatch, Rusty learns, turned to crickets to stay alive. He thinks of shrimp and his father’s odd, meme-worthy declaration that “crickets are land shrimp”. And has access to an abundance of cricket protein powder, courtesy Rob Bettancourt. Rusty does not (as of this week) find any cryptids. But he’s got an angle that would work if anything could.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 22nd of April, 2022. Sharp’s entrance to the story was set up the day before with the narration box, ‘A wild professor appears!’, and there’s a similar message when Sharp meets up with Mark Trail later on. I’m amused, even though I don’t play the genre of video games this references.

For Mark Trail, it’s become a working holiday. His father, Mark “Happy” Trail, teamed his trail-mix business up with “Cricket Bro” Rob Bettancourt and his brother, “Crypto Bro” Sterling. Why would Happy Trail be working with someone who pushes NFT scams? Beyond that Happy Trail got to know the Bettancourts when he was estranged from his son, and they needed a father, and you trust the people you like.

There’s more alarming news. The NFTs are some of where they get money. Most of it comes from logging, a business that exists in that awkward space of being necessary but also an environmental hazard. Some good news though, too. The Bettancourts take Mark Trail to the Wings Of Love rehabilitation center, a bird wildlife refuge. They donate some of their profits to support the place. It’s another nice touch, shading the Bettancourts so they aren’t as cartoonishly evil as your Jack Elrod-era story might have done. But … a couple computers are cheap, hard as it is for wildlife rescues to afford them. Is this the Bettancourts using some spare change to greenwash their business?

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 16th of April, 2022. Oh, hey, I think this is the first Attack of Nature since James Allen was doing the comic. I should reset the counter.

There’s little time to investigate. The Bettancourts’ lumber mill is on fire. Mark Trail rapidly deduces the problem: beavers. Oh, you may think of beavers as providing adorable videos the zoo tweets as coming from their “branch manager”. But they’ll cut down trees that are too near power lines. Or cut down power poles, mistaking them for trees. And that can cause fires. The Bettancourts don’t know what to do about the immediate problem besides putting out an anti-beaver press release. Mark Trail and Happy Trail take the lead in evacuating the workers. Happy Trail gets to a radio tower to give directions. Mark Trail — given his father’s compass and camping scarf, a symbol of reconciliation so obvious even I understand it — is able to navigate to the electrical control station and power things off. With the humans out of danger, fire-fighting can get going, and the disaster’s soon not.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 2nd of May, 2022. So I want to highlight this strip as representative of Rivera’s development as writer. She’s never been shy to have reasonably complicated storylines, with several independent threads and somewhat more complex emotions involved. But she has been embracing some touches of deep, essential Mark Trail squareness. In the first panel, loggers, caught in a fire aggravated by a long series of managerial blunders, are crying out things like “For Pete’s sake!” and “This is a pickle!” Elsewhere you get characters talking about things as “malarkey” (a word I’m warming to, as it connotes to me not just that someone is spreading nonsense but not even trying to spread good nonsense). The dialogue and the narration boxes are less stodgy than they used to be, as note the references to Internet memes that turn up in them. But they are keeping some of the stylized writing that made Mark Trail an ironic favorite of so many people who’d go on to consider it a sincere favorite.

You may wonder how the Bettancourts needed advice to evacuate workers from a forest fire. The company’s poorly run, the loggers explain to Mark Trail. No fire safety plan, the most relevant thing here. They turned to Happy Trail, the only person who’d even listen to complaints about unsafe working condition. But Happy Trail doesn’t own the mill; why is he in their business? Mark investigates his father.

The Bettancourts get a half-pipe built in the woods, part of preparing a party for some kind of NFT scam launch event. Mark Trail barely follows this when Bee Sharp appears. Sharp has evidence that the NFTs are a scam, with any actual money from them embezzled from the lumber mill. Sharp is there to disrupt Crypto Bro’s event and save the participants from being swindled. And getting revenge for that time Rob Bettancourt had a goat eat his lab coat. I’m not clear why Bee Sharp tells Mark Trail of his plans, except maybe to force Trail into high gear in clearing his father’s name. But I don’t see where Sharp would know anything about that. It may be Sharp was just gloating, as one will, about the chance to do good by being a chaos agent, and it happened to give Mark Trail some needed initiative.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 26th of May, 2022. Now you might think that it’s a pretty poor businessperson who’ll run a viable business like a logging mill poorly just to embezzle money to pump an investment scam. And yet every business you know is rolling out the NFT plans they started forming four months ago when it was just everybody not pitching an NFT scam warning that it was a scam.

As best Mark Trail can work out, his father ended up in that trap where when authority is absent, command flows to whoever competent is nearby and doesn’t shake it off fast enough. Happy Trail doesn’t seem to have investments in the lumber mill or the NFT scams. Or any documented management role. People just know he can tell the Bettancourts to straighten this out. Happy Trail also doesn’t seem to know what an NFT is. He explains to his son that they’re nothing but cheap promotional giveaways for cricket protein bars. He’s baffled by the idea someone would think a monkey picture could be worth anything. Or why it’d be dangerous if Bee Sharp shares his fraud accusations at the crypto event, as “nobody fights over computer games”.

The big day arrives, and it’s a good party. Rusty Trail even talks to a couple skater girls, and they have something to talk about. It’s cryptids. Bee Sharp turns up, though, to get to the DJ booth and slip some hard-hitting investigative journalism in to the EDM mix. I can’t tell you how he imagines this will turn out, but (as of Wednesday), it hasn’t yet.

Sunday Animals Watch!

• The Northwest Rainforest, 27 March 2022. It’s a good idea; we should have one.
• Evolutionary Carcinization, 3 April 2022. Whether it’s a good idea or not, we have it.
• Industrial Logging, 10 April 2022. We could do a better job with this, really.
• Beavers, 17 April 2022. Or we could turn it over to the beavers, that’s an option.
• Porcupines, 24 April 2022. Not mentioned, but fun to know: porcupines are born with hair (like guinea pigs, and are rare among rodents to do so). It stiffens up into quills in a couple days.
• Oregon Wildfires, 1 May 2022. We kind of have to have them too, but we could make it less of a disaster if we tried.
• Cricket Farming, 8 May 2022. Jules Rivera seems to think insect-eating is likely to become a non-novelty in Western diets and here we part ways.
• Bigfoot, 15 May 2022. I mean, this would be so cool, right?
• Lady Beetles, 22 May 2022. Look, there was no way to stop an invasive species of aphids except bringing in invasive lady beetles, that’s just now nature works, right?
• Beavers, 29 May 2022. They just thought they heard some running water around you and that maybe they could put a stop to that.
• Sunscreen, 5 June 2022. It’s a really good idea and yes, of course we’ve turned it into other species’ problem.
• Spiders, 12 June 2022. They’re not just for having other people do the superheroics anymore!

Next Week!

Dubious quotes and questionable relationships! Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth gets some love from me, at least. If all goes well, which would be a nice change of pace.

Statistics Saturday: Dow Jones Companies And How Much I Think I Could Scam Them

Note: everyone has some scam that they will fall for. For the purpose of a fair guideline here, I am thinking of a basic scam. Something like if I were to send an invoice for (say) $17,250 “for services rendered as per contract”, whether the listed company would issue me a check rather than ask any questions.

Dow Jones Company	How Much I Think I Could Scam Them
3M	Very Likely
American Express	Dead Certainty
Amgen	Unlikely
Apple	Toss-up
Boeing	More Likely Than Not
Caterpillar	Likely
Chevron	Very Likely
Cisco	Not Likely
Coca-Cola	Toss-up
Disney	They Don’t Even Pay The People They Actually Contracted To Pay
Dow	More Likely Than Not
Goldman Sachs	Would Send $50,000 Just Because That’s An Easier Number To Write Out
Home Depot	Unlikely
Honeywell	Wait, they’re in the Dow Jones Industrial Average? Like, the thermostat people? Really? Did every other business turn Mr Jones down?
IBM	Absolutely
Intel	They would try to pay and somehow it would never go through
Johnson & Johnson	Not until I showed up at their headquarters in New Brunswick and asked why their offices there look more like a college campus than the actual Rutgers campus across the street does
JPMorgan Chase	Oh yes
McDonald’s	Oh no
Merck	Probably not
Microsoft	Would either get laughed at or get the check in ten minutes with an apology, hard to say, depends who opens the envelope
Nike	Nope
Proctor & Gamble	Wait, they’re still around? I thought they vanished when the soap operas went off the air?
Salesforce	This company is itself a hoax slipped into the Dow Jones, so of course they’d pay, out of respect for another player of the game
Travelers	More Likely Not
UnitedHealth	Probably Not
Verizon	Don’t Get Me Started On Verizon
Visa	Somewhat Likely
Walgreen Boots Alliance	I have to have copied that name wrong, that can’t be it
Walmart	Without Question

Reference: West Jersey: Under Four Flags, Ralph K Turp.

What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Why did that lizard rapper visit Rusty? January – March 2022

Part of the current story in Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail was a family reunion. The Trails, and the Rogers family, got together. Reptiliannaire, the eco-rapper Mark Trail visited two storylines ago, visited after the launch of his new album. Reptiliannaire’s one of Rusty’s favorite singers.

Mark Trail said something about his father hiring Reptiliannaire. This is plausible. His father, Mark “Happy” Trail, runs a granola concern big enough to be a local environmental hazard and bully, though not so big as to be bought out by a real bastard company like Nestle. But this means Reptiliannaire went from his album launch to working a private event. That’s a lot of work. But it could be that the reptile-themed rap star world is small enough that you have to do that much work. Nobody confirms that Happy Trail hired him, though. As Mark Trail had a successful heist with Reptiliannaire that time, it’s plausible Happy Trail invited him and he came to see a quasi-friend and a fan. Take the interpretation you find most credible.

So this should catch you up on Mark Trail for the end of March, 2022. If you’re reading this after about June 2022 a more up-to-date plot recap should be here. I’ll also post news about the comic strip at this link. Thanks for reading and now let’s explore what all is going on with environmental villains who need punching.

Mark Trail.

9 January – 26 March 2022.

Mark Trail, Diana Daggers, and the veterans on the De-Bait Team had a plan to fight Duck Duck Goose shipping. The plan: make a public spectacle of themselves. Our Heroes got as many small ships as they could together to blockade the Lost Forest-area waterway the zebra-mussel-contaminated ships used. It’s a popular protest, because we all want that thrill of that stuck boat again. Duck Duck Goose makes the concession of declaring they’re totally going to make things better. And have Mark Trail, Diana Daggers, and Cliff (who probably has a last name) arrested.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 26th of January, 2022. Along with the protest Mark Trail posted his story, and Kelly Welly boosted it to their millions of followers.

Cherry posts bail for Mark, and someone’s able to post bail for Cliff. Diana Daggers is ready to sit it out in jail when Professor Bee Sharp bails her out. He’s apologetic for taking “Cricket Bro” Rob Bettancourt’s NFT money and glad to use it for something moral. She’s glad to help him patch his coat. And somehow the cops haven’t connected him to the boat explosion in Miami. You remember, from the story where Mark reconnected with his father, Mark “Happy” Trail. Hot Catch magazine editor Rafael Suave loves the story and the publicity the arrests generated. Mark Trail gets 55 new social media followers, only a few of him ask do he rp. It’s a happy resolution altogether.

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A minor plot resolved: the Sunny Soleil society has some tiny aquariums with Marimo balls. These can also spread zebra mussels. They give the readers instructions on how to dispose of them safely (freeze them for a day or more and throw them in the trash). And explain to Violet Cheshire how to handle it: let Cherry Trail handle it, for free. (This is also a good way to handle the poison ivy or the knotweed growing in from your neighbor’s yard.)

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The 7th of February starts the current batch of storylines. One is about Rusty Trail and his natural love of cryptids. He shares one about the Seaside Specter, a onetime human covered in seaweed and coral with eyes like a puffy-eyed fish. (Looking at him curses your eyeballs.) He would bond with Cherry Trail’s sister Olive at the family reunion, the big setting for the start of this story.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 4th of March, 2022. Really sweet of her. Not clear why she had that on hand, unless Mark or Cherry had told her about Rusty’s cryptid mania. I’m assuming the “it’s dangerous out there, take this” is a meme reference and I have no way to guess whether it’s something Olive would be expecting Rusty to get. Book recommendation: Joshua Blu Buhs’s Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend.

The reunion is a roller coaster of emotions for Rusty. He wanted to meet relatives as much as any kid that age does. But then it turned out Reptiliannaire, his favorite eco-rapper, was doing a concert nearby. There was no going to that, though. Happy Trail, though, is sensitive to his grandson’s feelings. That’s why Reptiliannaire visits, however the thing got arranged.

The happiness screeches to a halt when Happy Trail and Jolly Roger mention they’re doing new TV commercials. The young Mark Trail was traumatized by being the semi-willing child star of those ages ago. (Other kids, such as Rob Bettancourt, teased him for his natural on-camera squareness.) Now he’s traumatized because the new spokescreature is a monkey. That part’s survivable, but Monk Trail is also being turned into an NFT. Happy Trail’s startled to learn there’s anything about NFTs to concern an environmentalist, or a non-fool. His surprise that his new business partner didn’t bring up this big problem invites the question of how Happy Trail has built a successful business. You’d expect he would have been phished into sending the company to an e-mail claiming to be the county IRS inspector. Perhaps his really good Chief Operating Officer retired two weeks ago.

His NFT partner, in Portland, is Jadsen Sterling. Happy Trail asserts that Sterling and his brother are friends of Mark Trail’s. Turns out Sterling’s (step)brother is Rob “Cricket Bro” Bettancourt. Mark Trail spends the flight to Oregon (where they’d been planning to go for reasons that escape me; maybe it was a vacation?) trying to work out Sterling’s deal. He runs a tech firm committed to NFT scams, but makes his real money logging.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 16th of March, 2022. This is another moment of Rivera making clear the decision to treat the “traditional” Mark Trail as father to the one she’s writing about. And it’s another good reminder of our need to be as compassionate as we can even to the people who’ve hurt us.

And yet Sterling has the spare time to catch the Trails at the airport and offer them a ride. He introduces himself as “Crypto Bro” and hey, his brother Cricket Bro is there too. They share a story that’s brief but nice — how they bonded as stepbrothers over surfing — and then how they had befriended Happy Trail on the beach. They’d been cut off by their father, and Mark Trail wasn’t speaking to his at the time. This is a small story moment I find quite humanizing and effective. It’s a deft reminder that these people, villains as they are to us, have lives they’re basically happy with and have reason to be basically happy with.

That’s how the Bros and Happy Trail turned into a big business-family partnership mess.  And also explains why Happy Trail might not have asked them questions about the downsides of NFTs.  And that’s where we stand at the end of March. Also going on: a bunch of first panels with animals in the foreground looking at the camera. That’s a welcome feature to return to the strip.

Sunday Animals Watch

What parts of nature got attention in Sunday strips the past three months? And how badly off are they? Let’s review.

• Zebra mussels, 9 January 2022. Still a problem despite the plan to ignore the problem, somehow.
• Bobcats, 16 January 2022. Robertcats, if you haven’t been introduced, thank you.
• White-tailed deer, 23 January 2022. The population was in danger until we tried “have people not just shoot them”. Weird.
• American kestrels, 30 January 2022. They only weigh like six ounces which, even considering birds don’t weigh much, doesn’t seem like much.
• Horseshoe Crabs, 6 February 2022. Which have survived 455 million years, and then humans screwed things up.
• Alligators, 13 February 2022. My father’s living in South Carolina and constantly sending pictures of alligators that get near the apartment complex while my mother rolls her eyes all the way into North Carolina.
• Wildlife Crossings, 20 February 2022. Not an ideal solution to the problem of highways but at least some remediation.
• Vultures, 27 February 2022. Apparently they don’t circle dying animals? Huh. This is going to mess up the late, lamented comic strip Little Dog Lost.
• Spotted Owls, 6 March 2022. Threatened by invasive barred owls.
• Pandora Pinemoths, 13 March 2022. They don’t eat, as adults, because nature is weird and creepy.
• Western Gray Squirrels, 20 March 2022. You know how bad humanity is doing that we’re screwing up squirrels? Seriously.
• The Northwest Rainforest, 27 March 2022. Both of the remaining trees.

Next Week!

Wilbur Weston is not dead. I’ll go into the unhappy story of why not when I recap Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. That’s my plan for what to do next week.

What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Why is Mark Trail worked up about NFTs? October 2021 – January 2022

In the last scene of The Stingiest Man In Town, the 1978 Rankin/Bass adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge tells Cratchit to burn some more coal. Cratchit asks if that’s good for business and Scrooge laughs it off as good for humanity. The irony is it has turned out burning coal is extremely good business, as it’s catastrophic for humanity.

So this should catch you up to early January 2022 in Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail. If news about the strip breaks, or if you’re reading this after about April 2022, a more up-to-date essay is likely here. And now let’s get on to explaining the past three months of story.

Mark Trail.

17 October 2021 – 8 January 2022.

We had two and a half stories going on when I last checked in on the Lost Forest. One was Mark Trail’s assignment with former rival/high-speed-pursuer Diana Daggers. It’s to investigate a shipping company spreading zebra mussels. One was Diana Daggers’s breakup with her pop-science star friend Professor Bee Sharp. And one was Cherry Trail’s efforts to move a bee colony before its extermination. Each has advanced some. I’ll take each strand as a separate thing.

Cherry Trail’s first. She’s been landscaping for the Sunny Soleil Society. Their statue of the Forest Pioneer got colonized by bees. Society chair Violet Cheshire hires “Honest Ernest”, the new pest control guy in town. Also husband of one of the Society members. So she calls on her friends with the Black Rose Garden Club, who plan a daring nighttime bee-relocation heist.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 15th of December, 2021. Just wanted to brag that I saw Honest Ernest and the Exterminator Gators play at Common Ground music festival and they were a better-than-you-expect Devo cover band.

Honest Ernest and his staff intrude, though. Mark Trail arrives, fighting them back with nature facts and a shovel. It’s a powerful combo and lets the Black Rose sneak off with the bees. But there are consequences: Caroline (Ernest’s wife) complains to Cheshire about the bee-napping. Cheshire cuts through the charges and counter-charges of trespassing and whatever bee-napping would be. If the bees left on their own, why, there’s no need for a bee-extermination contract. Cherry agrees, falsely, that sometimes bees just go off somewhere else. And that, you know, the Sunny Soleil Society building likely has termites that could actually use extermination. Cheshire’s up for that and we have a settlement that’s happy except for the termites.

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Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 23rd of October, 2021. The villainy here might seem unsubtle but, no, it turns out society’s villains are pretty much just this.

Mark Trail’s story next. This was about taking underwater photos of Duck Duck Goose freighters, carrying zebra mussels into new waters. Daggers thinks the photos are lousy, but Mark Trail’s old army buddy, and De-Bait Team member Cliff, likes them. Trail and Daggers work on reporting how the giant shipping company is polluting new territories. So, Duck Duck Goose sends some toughs around to bust things up.

Mark Trail, Daggers, and Cliff are able to escape, thanks in part to Daggers swiping Cherry Trail’s shovel earlier. They hole up in the De-Bait Team lodge, a more defensible retreat, or at least one that’s harder for Duck Duck Goose to find. Much of the attention shifted away from Mark to Cherry at this point. It left me confused whether the zebra-mussels storyline had dried up, when I was reading day-to-day. Like, had Mark Trail published and I missed it? No, the story was moving to the back of the stage for a bit.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 1st of December, 2021. Wow! Where does this come from besides the entire and complete history of labor-capital interactions?

And Mark Trail continued thinking, not only how to report on Duck Duck Goose, but also how to stop them bringing zebra mussels into the Lost Forest’s waterways. In a moment that ran, for us, on Christmas Day he noted how poinsettias are not actually poisonous, but have this reputation. That “if we can look intimidating to Duck Duck Goose, it might be enough to get them out of our waters”. I don’t know what that would entail either.

Poinsettias, according to the National Capital Poison Center, can cause nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea if eaten. But they are not actually dangerous to children or pets. Quite inconvenient, though, it appears.

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And the last thread, generally, Diana Daggers’s things. She came to the zebra mussels story miserable after an unexplained breakup with Professor Bee Sharp. As Cliff and Mark Trail came over to make amends, she explained. She was getting paid with Non-Fungible Token money. Much as she misses Sharp, she couldn’t take money literally raised by destroying the planet.

Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail for the 13th of November, 2021. I mean, on the one hand, this is something that could happen at any photo session and is the result of animals being animals, and not your props. On the other hand, NFTs are ecocidal scams so if we slap them down for the wrong reasons, well, they still needed the slapping.

So “Cricket Bro” Rob Bettancourt had the brainwave to sell NFTs of all sorts of Bee Sharp-focused nonsense. Bee Sharp stuck through Daggers leaving. But he was shaken when a photo shoot results in a goat tearing his lab coat, and leaves. It pains me to admit NFTs can’t be blamed for that, although if it gets someone to stop making a mistake, fine.

We learn that when Bettancourt calls Mark Trail, offering to make him the face of his NFT projects. How this is going to fit into the zebra mussels story is not yet known. Catch you in April. We should have some idea then.

Sunday Animals Watch

So here’s what nature events we’ve been seeing on Sundays. Nearly all of them have been reflected in the weekday continuity, too. It’s a nice tight integration of things.

• Bees, 17 October 2021. Who has a bad word for bees, at this point?
• Trees, 24 October 2021. Similarly, they’re still doing a lot of great work.
• Bats, 31 October 2021. They’re doing good too although I’d like them out of the attic when convenient, please.
• Skunks, 7 November 2021. So last summer I was walking late at night and saw a skunk shuffling along. And then saw a cottontail rabbit charging at the skunk and dashing back away, charging up and dashing away. It’s the aggressive get-out-of-here move rabbits sometimes do. I got out of the area and lost them in the night after that and I just hope that scene worked out the way the rabbit imagined it would.
• Goats, 14 November 2021. Lot of people have good things to say about them.
• Bees, 21 November 2021. Look, if you’re not sold on bees by this point I don’t know what the trouble is.
• Turkeys, 28 November 2021. Everybody likes to talk about the dubious legend about how the turkey was almost the United States’s national bird, but do we ever talk about how turkeys have pretty near the same body plan as peacocks? If they’d done a little work on their coloration every New World nation would want them as national birds.
• Garden Clubs, 5 December 2021. Get yourself a garden club that’ll sneak out in the middle of the night to steal a beehive, is what we’re saying.
• Salamanders, 12 December 2021. Which have not appeared in the comic strip recently. Might be a setup to something later on.
• Climate Change, 19 December 2021. It’s hard work to do anything to remediate now, but the alternative is even more, harder work, later on.
• Poinsettias, 26 December 2021. Also, you can keep the one you get at Christmas and nurse it through the year. You have to do something I don’t understand to get them to bloom at Christmas, but it’s doable.
• Cryptocurrency, 2 January 2022. Guh. Could we please not, for once, everybody?
• Zebra mussels, 9 January 2022. Which had a Sunday panel appearance back in August, too, but the problem (and plot) have been sticking around.

Next Week!

Is Wilbur Weston dead, and why does everyone want him to be? Come with me on a CRUISE SHIP in Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth, next week, if all goes well.

What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? What’s with Carter Hendricks’s jacket? May – August 2021

The Summer story in Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp turned, in part, on what school a “BSU” jacket belonged to. The school colors therefore mattered. Gil Thorp has started running, in GoComics, in color. But, as is common for weekday comics, the colorizing gets done without checking the writers for guidance. I do not know why the colorizers of daily strips don’t get guidance from the original cartoonists. I understand if the cartoonists do not wish to do the extra work of picking out colors if they’re not paid for it. It makes every day as much work as a Sunday strip.

But the practice keeps screwing things up. Here, at least, it’s an innocent screw-up. The BSU jacket colors were not mentioned in text until several weeks after the jacket’s appearance. Whoever put color in had no direction. And that’s the sad usual for colorized dailies.

So this should catch you up to late August 2021. If you’re reading this after about November 2021, or if any news breaks about Gil Thorp, a more useful essay may be at this link. Thanks for reading, high school sports fans.

Gil Thorp.

31 May – 21 August 2021.

The Spring story — a long one — was mostly about who would be on the library board. There was a small piece going on about Corina Karenna, not related to the main action. So I’ll close that out.

Karenna saw no point going to college. She’s got an appalling record. All the athletic scholarships she could apply for are long gone. And her mother is too depressed to function without her. Still, Mimi Thorp hates to see a talented, bright, determined kid just peter out. She pokes around her contacts and alumni and finds a setup. Karenna moves to Syracuse, takes community college classes to get her credentials in order. Transfer to Le Moyne College, where there’s volleyball scholarship money and roommates to be had.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 23rd of June, 2021. There’s story detail lost in my compression. An important one is Mimi Thorp talking with Corina Karenna’s mother. And her mother talking about how she feels her daughter’s protecting her more than she actually needs. So the later assertion that Karenna’s mother did “a lot of the work” in setting this up has some textual basis. And it at least addresses the question of whether Karenna’s mother can function without her daughter. Anyway, I still don’t see how you could tell someone needs a roommate in two years.

And … Karenna’s mother? She, Thorp says, did a lot of the work putting this together. And believes she can keep herself together while her daughter’s at school. One likes her optimism, but I admit seeing many failure modes.

Meanwhile, the vacancy on the Library Board. The Board loves it. It’s drawn them, like, attention. It helps they have two candidates. One is young Zane Clark whose family depends on the library’s public good. The other is cranky middle-aged Abel Brito who doesn’t see why the public should be paying for good. And the juicy part is that Zane’s dating Katy Brito. So Zane’s and Abel’s every interaction is a good rousing fight.

The Library Board plays it for what it’s worth, with a public debate and everything. Zane pushing ideas of ways the library could do more. Abel pushing ways that the library could run like a business, unaware that almost every business is appallingly run. Only one person can get the seat, though, and either way will hurt Katy. Coach Thorp pushes his way into the action for some reason.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 14th of June, 2021. And having re-read the story a couple times to summarize it, no, I still don’t understand why Gil Thorp considers this worth his attention. I guess it’s nice to relieve some stress from Zane Clark and Katy Brito’s lives? Which, I guess, if he’s a nice guy should be enough motivation, but I really would have thought “didn’t get to be on the Milford Library Board” the sort of thing someone bounces back from. Also nervous about talking up “life in a meritocracy”, since what that means is “we made up charts so our racism looks like test scores”.

What he does is nudge Rollie Conlan, 29-year veteran of the Library Board, into retiring. The argument being they need both Zane Clark’s ideas about providing public services and Abel Brito’s ideas about making money. So, two vacancies, two candidates, and all is happy. Apart from family dinners that now argue about whether the library should be providing a service or something.

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With that, the 10th of July, the Spring story ended. The Summer story began the 12th of July and it looks to wrap up this week or next. This was a hard one to parse, as Rubin and Whigham played coy about what the conflict even was. And there were two threads that didn’t seem to have anything to do with one another, not until the end. I can’t fault them for verisimilitude. Often in life we have no idea we’re in a story until it’s ending. But as art? It meant we had weeks that seemed to be watching people deploy golf terminology.

So here’s the golf thread. Carter Hendricks is in his second summer as part of the Milford Country Club. And he’s a popular guy. Does well, as a “humble industrial solvents salesman”, playing games for money. Oh, he blows the occasional shot, sure, but somehow he’s always got what he needs when it counts. Almost suspiciously so. Like, when he happens to play a cheap golf ball instead of his usual.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 4th of August, 2021. A pivotal moment: if they’d gone golfing two hours earlier Hendry’s scam might have gone unproven. Also a good example of the frustrations in reading Gil Thorp. The first two panels are dropping plot points, and the third is setting up the important reveal of Hendry’s Bemidji Statue University jacket. Read the whole month, or even the whole week, and it makes sense. Read just the day’s strip and there’s no guessing what’s happening. I don’t have a good solution to this.

Enter someone who can be suspicious, besides Gil Thorp. Heather Burns, who’d been star of the summer storyline in 2017, is back from college. University of Iowa. Thorp’s able to get her a spot as assistant coach for Milford Football, which pays in glory. She wants to be a reporter, because she doesn’t know where money comes from. It comes from selling coffee in the library’s former periodicals alcove.

She puts together Thorp’s doubts with Hendricks’s green-and-white “BSU” rain jacket that he got from somewhere. He’s in fact Carson Hendry, who won two conference golf championships for Bemidji State University, in Minnesota. Had a minor career as a pro. Also had a six-month jail term for stealing clients’ money. He is, in short, hustling the club members.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 19th of August, 2021. I admit I’m not clear what charges the golf club could press. I guess faking your handicap while betting on games is some kind of fraud but does it rise to a prosecutable offense? The characters admit that’s all a bluff, but I’d expect a good hustler to be sure of what he can get away with claiming without provably breaking a law. But it could be Hendry isn’t all that good a hustler, too.

They kick him out, demanding he repay his winnings, which they know he’ll never do. Meanwhile, at the Milford Star, sportswriter Marjie Ducey sees good reporting talent, albeit in the service of a non-story. Hendry isn’t a public figure, at least not public enough, unless the country club presses charges, which they don’t see any good reason to do. Editor Dale Parry agrees this shows Burns to have good instincts and abilities. But he’s already offered their job to someone with two years’ reporting experience.

And that is about where we land. It’s again a point for Rubin and Whigham’s verisimilitude that Burns’s good work doesn’t get rewarded with the job she wants and needs. Sometimes things suck and you have to muddle along with what’s all right in the circumstances. But the story isn’t quite over yet, and as you can see, sometimes Coach Thorp figures a back door into solutions.

Milford Sports Watch!

Who’s Milford been playing, at least until the summer break caught up ? These teams have turned up in past months.

• Madison (5 – 8 June)
• Oakwood (28 June)
• Valley Tech (30 June)
• Valley Tech (5 – 7 July)

And colleges get mention!

• Le Moyne College (23 – 26 June)
• Onondaga Community College (25 June)
• Bemidji State University (5, 6, 16 August.) Also a reference in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Red Zone Cuba that’s now about something I specifically kind-of understand. (“They’re over the Cuba-Bemidji border.”)
• Boise State University (16 August.) A guess about the BSU jacket.

Next Week!

It’s been months since Randy Parker disappeared from Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker! And weeks since the bed-and-breakfast burned down! And we haven’t been seeing Norton any! Is there anything left in the comic strip? We’ll check in soon, if all goes well.

60s Popeye: Oil’s Well That Ends Well, and how is that not Oyl’s Well?

We’re back on Paramount Cartoon Studios territory here. Oil’s Well That Ends Well, from 1961, is credited to Carl Meyer and Jack Mercer for the story and Seymour Kneitel for direction.

My favorite old-time-radio podcast last week ran an episode of The Saint, starring the beloved Vincent Price as Leslie Charteris’s beloved-I’m-told rogue adventurer. It was some stuff about a silver mine that the assayer was very clear was worthless. Well, turns out, it’s worthless if you don’t count the cinnabar (mercury) deposits. Was the assayer in on the scheme? Or was he somehow unaware that cinnabar was a thing also mined? The plot’s wrapping-up here’s-why-stuff-happened scene never explained.

So this is a cartoon about Brutus selling Olive Oyl a fake oil well. Except the punch line is that it’s a gusher. Brutus told us the viewers that the oil field had been dry for fifty years. That seems like a big mistake for whoever owned the field to make. This can all probably be rationalized but it says something that I’m wondering about it. What it says is there were reasons they treated me like that in middle school. These are not reasonable responses to the cartoon.

The story’s all reasonable enough. Olive Oyl wins $10,000 on the Get Rich Quick show. Brutus, watching at home, needs a good honest swindle to get that money. This cartoon it feels like Brutus doesn’t know Olive Oyl, but then why does he bother shaving to put on the persona of Sumner J Farnsworth? But if he does know Olive Oyl why is there never a moment of shocked recognition? Well, there’s a nice joke where Brutus discards the shell game as “not too good” and armed robbery as “too dishonest”. He settles on oil stocks which he thought were worthless. Which leaves another nagging thought for me: did Brutus legitimately own the oil field? Or did he buy worthless stocks from someone else? Or did he just figure the time he’d spent making fake oil stocks was wasted but never got around to throwing them out?

Well of course she’s offended. The barrel should read OYL, or at least OYL OIL.

Brutus rigs up some oil to spurt on command; salting mines is a respectable enough way to pull off this kind of scam. But Olive Oyl also says she can go pick out any oil well she wants. How’d she pick the right one? This isn’t a plot hole, though; it’s reasonable to suppose Brutus is nudging her to the one he’d prepared. Forcing (in the stage magician’s sense) a choice is a skill of the con artist. I’m intrigued that this is something that would be taken without question, by a naive enough viewer. Then doubted as implausibly by a more skeptical viewer. And then accepted as self-explanatory by a sophisticated enough viewer. There’s some lesson about how people engage with their stories in there.

Brutus runs his car over Popeye, twice. It’s a startling moment and I can’t say why. Maybe it lacks the absurdity of most Popeye-versus-Brutus violence.

After Popeye punches Brutus into the oil well it starts gushing again. Assuming Olive Oyl’s title is good and the oil doesn’t run out in ten minutes that’s great for her. She showers Popeye with a flurry of kisses drawn from the 1954 Fright to the Finish. Why have stock footage if you’re not using it?

While pitching Olive Oyl on the oil well Brutus talks about doubling, tripling, even quadripling he “mazuma”, a reminder of the 20th century’s many odd slang terms for money. Which comes back around to Jackson Beck, voice of Bluto/Brutus/etc. When the voice actor’s friend Alfred Bester wrote The Demolished Man he named one of the cops Jackson Beck. Part of the typographical chic of the novel was using, for example @ as shorthand for ‘at’, so ‘Sam Atkins’ was rendered as ‘Sam @kins’. When the story first appeared, Bester tried writing the name as $$son Beck, trusting that readers would connect $$ to “money” to “jack”. They did not. The spelling of Jackson was normalized in subsequent editions.

What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Do all Mary Worth characters fall for romance scams? April – July 2019

For the second update in a row I am not upset with Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. If you are upset with it, you’re probably reading this essay sometime after early July 2019. Around late September or early October 2019 I should have a more up-to-date plot recap at this link, so you may know just what to be angry about.

On my other blog, I describe comic strips with mathematical themes, none of which should make anyone angry this week.

Mary Worth.

13 April – 7 July 2019.

Artheur Zerro is the new love in Charterstone cat-owner Estelle’s life. He’s charming. He loves cats. He’s retiring soon from his construction-engineering job in Malaysia. He wants to see the world, ideally with Estelle. If there is one flaw in Zerro’s existence it’s that he’s a complete fraud who’s already scammed Estelle for ten thousand bucks and is coming at her for more. Mary Worth, with the help of Toby, puts together the evidence. Artheur Zerro’s profile picture is actually that of a South African model. He’s not in any professional societies as best Toby can find. He spelled his own name wrong, for crying out loud.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 13th of April, 2019. Props by the way to Libby, the one-eyed cat that (so far as I know) first got Estelle into this comic. She’s been doing great about having that offbeat one-eyed-cat charm and I think it comes across even when you just see her in one panel, like this.

Estelle can answer all Mary Worth’s concerns, noting, “shut up” and “is not” and “no”. Mary Worth retreats to Toby for reassurance that she is right about this and everything. Estelle’s confidence is not shaken. Artheur’s going to be arriving for a real live in-person visit for the first time in a couple days and she has to get ready. Then Artheur calls with bad news. His client’s having problems. He doesn’t have the cash to fly home. But, you know, if she could send him five thousand dollars he could make it.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 24th of April, 2019. Estelle: “This is … unsettling. You have a DeviantArt page?” Mary Worth: “No no that was a friend who made a prank page about what it would be like if I were way into Kidd Video and building a side continuity about what if She-Lion met a dinosaur! Never you mind it!”

So now Estelle has big enough doubts. She turns to Mary Worth. Mary Worth asks, if you love the Internet so much, why don’t you marry … this article about online romance scams. Estelle isn’t having that. But she does accept Mary Worth’s observation that there isn’t actually a rush. If Artheur loves her, he’ll love her three weeks from now too. “Love is patient … and rejoices with the truth,” she says, although her quote for that Sunday was from Earl “The Pearl” Monroe and seems to be more about how to play basketball well. But, waiting for Artheur’s client who totally exists? That’s something Estelle’s willing to try. Artheur begs for money again and she says no. Theirs is an enduring love which can wait for — oh, Artheur’s not having it.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 5th of May, 2019. I did see fans complaining that Artheur’s turn here was too abrupt. That is, that if he ratcheted up the anger and emotional manipulation on Estelle more slowly she might have been coaxed into sending more money. I agree that a professional scammer could probably have hooked Estelle again, at least for a while and a couple thousand bucks more. But that would be only slight narrative progress over what we’ve seen already. And to take the cheap shot, do we really want a Mary Worth story to take longer to get where it’s going?

Estelle hangs up on him, and cries. Artheur doesn’t call, or respond to calls, or e-mails, or anything. Mary Worth visits, bringing a tuna casserole, and Estelle falls into her arms, sobbing. “Finally!”, our hero thinks.

Estelle confesses how much a fool she feels. And, worse, that she’s still waiting for Artheur to apologize. Which, yeah, may sound dumb to people who’ve never fallen for a scam, or fallen for an emotionally abusive partner. Don’t be smug. All of us have some line of patter we’d fall for, and we’d resent the people who try to save us from it. Anyway, Estelle thinks she sees things better now. And she agrees to talk with Terry Bryson who I’m informed by Mary Worth lives at Charterstone and knows stuff that’s useful to do in these situations.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 22nd of May, 2019. Terry: “Yes, and … I … wait, what? He gave you a questionnaire and you filled it out? Like … I … I’m sorry, I guess they taught us about scammers pulling that but I never thought … like, you actually did that? Seriously? … Wow. Just … wow.” (Of course, I probably play it over-cagey with my personal information. By this I mean this past week I wouldn’t actually give my exact address to a friend I’ve known for 25 years because I couldn’t think of any legitimate reason he would have to know it.)

Terry finds out when Estelle will be available to talk about this in full view of the newspaper readers. Terry talks about how romance scams aren’t just filler episodes for old-time-radio cop shows anymore. She lays out how pretty much every step of Artheur’s wooing of Estelle was following the scam playbook. And, yeah, while Estelle can call the cops on Artheur, she’s never going to see her ten thousand bucks again. She spends a long night eating chocolate ice cream, feeling lousy, and talking to her cat, which is about the right thing to do.

And she gets right back on that seniors dating site. In barely any time she’s telling Mary of her new beau. He’s local. He doesn’t have pets, but he’s cool with the idea. He likes singing; she likes playing music. They both like travel. Oh, and he has southern California’s sixth-largest collection of boutique mayonnaises.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 11th of June, 2019. Mary Worth: “And … up against the window … is that Rex Morgan, M.D.’s Edward? And his … dog? What’s the deal with Edward’s dog?”

Yes, Wilbur Weston is her new dating partner. It’s a relationship I didn’t see coming, but, eh, they seem to like it. Mary Worth and Toby take the news as a chance to spend a couple weeks telling each other how great love is. And how great it is that Wilbur and Estelle can both bond over having been bilked for money by putative romantic partners. (I am curious whether Wilbur’s shared his experience with Estelle already.) She’s so excited about this she even goes for a boat ride and dinner with Dr Jeff, to talk about how great it is other people have a relationship. And how great it is to try new things. I can’t swear that she isn’t dumping Dr Jeff so smoothly he doesn’t even realize it’s happening.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 24th of June, 2019. Wait. Exactly what kind of homogenous ecru lumps was Dr Jeff consuming that Mary Worth would find him an un-adventurous eater?

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And that settles the saga of Estelle and her online dating thing. With the 1st of July it appears a new story’s started. Dawn Weston, Wilbur’s daughter, is back from gallivanting about Europe. This in time for Wilbur to go off to Mozambique. He’s interviewing cyclone survivors for his column about people who find they’re not dead, and definitely not avoiding Estelle. Mary’s filling in for him as the Ask Wendy advice columnist. And Dawn is … being pretty cagey about what the plot this summer is. No hints so far. Still, I like this scheme where the Mary Worth plot starts in time for a new What’s Going On In post. It’s tidy.

Dubiously Sourced Quotes of Mary Worth Sunday Panels!

I’m still not happy with the Comics Kingdom redesign. But it does seem to have settled on showing the proper half-page format for most of the Sunday strips. This includes the full first row of the story comics, which is of course where we get those quotes that may or may not come from anything. I’m hoping things don’t screw up again. Although even when they were screwed up the Washington Post’s comics page seemed to carry the half-page format. Maybe they’ll keep doing that if the need returns.

• “Love is blind.” — William Shakespeare, 14 April 2019.
• “A good decision is based on knowledge, not on numbers.” — Plato, 21 April 2019.
• “Just be patient. Let the game come to you. Don’t rush. Be quick, but don’t hurry.” — Earl Monroe, 28 April 2019.
• “Although I know it’s unfair, I reveal myself one mask at a time.” — Stephen Dunn, 5 May 2019.
• “Why must this be so mortifying? Oh, that’s right. Because it’s my life.” — Tessa Dare, 12 May 2019.
• “Truth is everybody is going to hurt you. You just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” — Bob Marley, 19 May 2019
• “We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 26 May 2019
• “No one is ever a victim, although your conquerers would have you believe in your own victimhood. How else could they conquer you?” — Barbara Marciniak, 2 June 2019.
• “The emotion that can break your heart is sometimes the very one that heals it.” — Nicholas Sparks, 9 June 2019.
• “Birds sing after a storm: why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?” — Rose Kennedy, 16 June 2019.
• “Love is friendship that has caught fire.” — Ann Landers, 23 June 2019.
• “I’ve been very fortunate.” — Dolly Parton, 30 June 2019.
• “Just living is not enough … one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.” — Hans Christian Andersen, 7 July 2019.

I’m sad to report the auto care place on the corner has not updated its inspirational-yet-despairing sign. It’s still on “You Can Make A Difference If you Try”. I will have updates as they occur.

Also, last time I did this, I wrote the bulk of the essay before the Mary Worth Sunday strip posted. So I made a placeholder for that day’s dubious quote, and guessed William Shakespeare as the author and guess what happened? This actually happened and I would provide evidence except that I don’t want to be known as the guy who proved he correctly guessed someone who might be quoted by a Mary Worth Sunday strip.

Next Week!

I check in again on The Ghost Who Walks. It’s Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, Sunday continuity. Any updates or news about any story strip should be at this link, meanwhile.

What’s Going On In Mary Worth? How can you scam a Mary Worth character? January – April 2019

It is a refreshing change that I am not upset with Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. I am still upset with Comics Kingdom, since the redesigned site is quite bad. But that won’t stop me recapping the plot of the last three months. If you’re reading this essay after about July 2019, I may have a more up-to-date plot recap here. Good luck finding what you need.

If what you need is mathematically themed comic strips, though? I’ve got them here. Please, enjoy. Some of last week’s comics should be at this link.

Mary Worth.

20 January – 12 April 2019

Last time you’ll recall, Toby thought her marriage to Ian was in danger. The danger was Jannie. She’s one of Ian’s students. She can stop talking about what an inspirational teacher Ian is only long enough to point out he’s brilliant too. Toby could not believe someone saying stuff like that about her Ian. Ian had no doubts that he is, truly, the greatest Local College instructor of all time. Jannie had no doubts that she had Ian wrapped around her fingers. Toby was sure they must be having an affair. Ian was unaware that this could be, or could even look like, an affair. It’s a specific sort of obliviousness that I believe in.

Jannie figures it’s time to slack off. And she commits to it, slacking off as much as she buttered up Ian in the first place. She skips turning in an assignment, giving Ian nothing but a wink instead. Ian gets so mopey about having to fail a student who didn’t turn in an assignment that it convinces Toby he’s having an affair. Mary Worth reminds her that “talking with your husband about things that distress you” is an option. Toby is unconvinced.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 2nd of February, 2019. And you may ask whether the comics have enjoyed a more wonderful facial expression than Ian’s in the second panel there. The answer is no, not in 2019, not yet.

Jannie is angry that she failed. Ian tries to explain that she didn’t turn in the assignment. She unloads on what an old fool he is and demands to know, pretty much, why he isn’t dead or something. We don’t actually see her ask if she can get extra credit. Jannie goes back to wherever temporary Mary Worth characters go after their plots have ended. She tries to hook up with Michael, who’d been interested in her when she was flattering Ian. He’s got a girlfriend now. So, she can’t talk with him anymore. She’s got to smoke her collapsible blackboard pointer by herself.

Ian comes home, moping about what a fool he is. He tells Toby he needs to talk. This is lucky. Mary Worth has been trying, continuously, since the start of the year to get Toby to try talking with Ian about her anxieties. And it finally took! Ian laughs off the idea he was having an affair with one of his students. Or even that one of his students could find him attractive or inspirational. Fair enough that he doubts himself, in the situation. But it also means his answer to “I’m worried you’re having an affair with one of your students” is “Oh, no, that student was only using me for my gradebook”.

But that is, after all, a happy ending. Toby and Ian are extremely married. They’re happy that they are too. And they’ll even try this “communicating” thing, in case a problem ever comes up again, which it never will.

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The new, and current, plot started the 18th of February. It began with a visit to Estelle, who I never figured on seeing again. She’s the widow who adopted Libby, the one-eyed cat that Mary picked up after pet-dating Saul Wynter. Estelle and Libby are having a great time. But Mary Worth is going to keep visiting until Estelle gets herself a very heterosexual relationship. So Estelle tries out a seniors dating web site. Mary is so happy with the prospect she doesn’t even have time to register disapproval of doing stuff on the Internet.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 3rd of March, 2019. So, yeah, the Sunday strips are among the things that Comics Kingdom has screwed up with their very bad redesign. The way the strips had been, this comic would run on three rows, and be larger and easier to read. I believe it might also have had another panel. The more old-fashioned Sunday strips are often designed with a panel that can be dropped without loss of narrative cohesion in order to allow newspapers to lay them out like this. I’m not sure, because I didn’t save this strip at the time of publication. (More modern strips, here I mean the ones that will use a full Sunday spread to do, like, a two-panel comic but with lots of solid-colored background shapes, don’t do this. I don’t know whether the artists draw different compositions for newspaper needs or whether they just don’t offer alternate layouts.)

Estelle tries out a couple of dates, which all go hilariously wrong. One guy turns out to be old! Another is a male chauvinist. Another is polygamous. One is even a poor. It’s a fun week watching her have fantastically bad dates. Fun enough I don’t mind that they could have talked on the phone for ten minutes before the date. Or they could have gotten a coffee mid-afternoon instead. Estelle could have saved herself some awful evenings. I don’t care.

And Estelle doesn’t give up. She’s going to keep online-dating until she finds the right scam to fall for. That would be Arthur Zerro, a “widower, construction engineering manager, music lover, and traveller”. He’s working in Malaysia. But he lives in Santa Royale, and is eager to get back home in a couple months. It looks like a great match. They both love travel. Estelle says she loves “multicultural cuisine”. We longtime Mary Worth snarkers take this to mean she likes those combined Taco Bell/Kentucky Fried Chicken/Pizza Hut places.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 16th of March, 2019. Contrary to the easy jokes, Mary Worth likes the Internet. It allowed her the chance to be an advice columnist for people all over the world who can’t figure out how to ask their appropriately suitable partner what’s worrying them, and who need an inspirational quote of dubious origin to set them straight.

Arthur Z continues being too good to be real. He loves cats. He calls to read poetry to Estelle. He wants to devote his retirement to Estelle’s happiness. And she thinks that sounds great. He wants to have a nice exchange of questionnaires, the way real people will really do for real in reality. She offers answers. Her favorite food. Her hobbies. What kind of car she drives. What was her elementary school teacher’s pet’s maiden name. What’s her bank’s routing number. Still, the questionnaire part goes great. Arthur even has the same favorite band that she does! It’s the Beatles.

It’s not much of a story if nothing weird happens, though. In an e-mail Arthur misspells his name. I’d be snarkier about this except I know how many times autocorrect has fixed my ‘Jsoeph’ at the end of e-mails this past month. I think my keyboard has issues. Anyway, we also finally see Arth[e|u]r on-screen. He’s not the stunningly good-looking man of his profile picture. He’s more what you get when Louie DePalma didn’t realize that Oscar Madison was also in the transporter pod. So now we experienced readers know something must be up. Persons are only untidy because they’re using all their organizing energy running a confidence scheme.

Artheur falls silent. When he finally connects he has woes. There was an accident on the job site. He’s all right, but the job is going to take months, maybe a year longer now. At least, unless someone has ten thousand dollars that she could wire him. Just as a loan. You know, like someone whose credit score has fluttered between 785 and 813 for the past thirty-six months might be able to swing. Its a hard story, but Estelle decides she had best fall for it.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 2nd of April, 2019. “Well, yeah, but only like fifty bucks. I needed it to get the IndieGogo campaign seeded. It’s going pretty well, we’ve had it up four days and it’s already collected $3,500 so we’re thinking there’s a good chance it’ll succeed. I think what’s putting it over is Artheur recording these videos where he explains how to do any home-repair thing anyone who donates $25 asks for. There’s, like, thousands of people who just let the faucets leak a little bit because they’re afraid of how to fix them, and Artheur’s got this great stage persona that lets you know this is about as challenging as replacing the battery in your car. And, gosh, I never realized that was like three minutes of work if you did it slow, not before Artheur did that video about how it works.”

Estelle mentions Artheur’s problems to Mary Worth. Mary Worth underplays her concern. She just asks if it was a lot of money Artheur needed. How well Estelle knows Artheur. Whether Estelle does, in fact, have the common sense that God bestowed upon gravel. But, Mary hasn’t got actual evidence.

So what’s there to do but call on Toby? Who is an expert in this sort of thing. In a sequence that ran in the strip like 800 years ago she fell for a phishing e-mail and she had to get a whole credit card cancelled and replaced. So Toby has skills, and a need to prove them. She’ll wipe out the shame of falling for a “you’re account has exhalated” notice yet! It’s on to a series of panels of “people looking at a laptop”. Thanks to Google Image Search she finds Artheur Zerro’s picture is really that of a “South African male model named Ivan Inghem”. I’m disappointed that my own DuckDuckGo search indicates there’s no such person. I would have been so impressed had Mary Worth used some obscure-to-Americans attractive face.

Anyway, Artheur Zerro’s name is fake too. So now the problem is how to break this to Estelle. That should go great, though. What person do we love more than whoever makes it impossible to ignore how titanic our blunders were? Mary tries the direct approach: show her pictures of Ivan Inghem. Point out nobody in the construction industry knows the name “Artheur Zerro”. That he took ten thousand bucks off her. So this all looks like it’s going well.

I am delighted to have a whole Mary Worth plot recap that does not leave me furious with the story. It’s been a couple of stories of gentle emotional charge. Jannie, Ian, Toby, and Estelle have been acting like clods. But they mostly acted like clods in ways I can accept. Jannie assumed she had a level of trust she didn’t. Ian didn’t think his little problems worth discussing. Toby thought her problems too big to discuss. Estelle fell for a decent line from a scammer. They’re believable enough. And I’m pleasantly surprised that Mary Worth is going back and checking in on the cat she couldn’t adopt because Doctor Jeff was allergic. I’m curious what’s going to follow Estelle’s fall.

I was starting to fear that the car care place wouldn’t update their inspirational-yet-I-can-make-it-despairing message board. But I had just finished the draft on Mark Trail last week when I saw, yay! They had a new message! And only I feel it interrogating me, “So why do you refuse to try?”

Dubiously Sourced Quotes of Mary Worth Sunday Panels!

• “I was a disinterested student.” — David Fincher, 20 January 2019.
• “Communication is something we all take for granted.” — Miriam Margolyes, 27 January 2019.
• “Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.” — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 3 February 2019.
• “A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.” — William Shakespeare, 10 February 2019.
• “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” — Mignon McLaughlin, 17 February 2019.
• “As daddy said, life is 95 percent anticipation.” — Gloria Swanson, 24 February 2019.
• “The single life is not one I willingly chose for myself.” — Jessica Savitch, 3 March 2019.
• “Falling in love as we know it is an addictive experience.” — Susan Cheever, 10 March 2019.
• “Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things.” — Keanu Reeves, 17 March 2019.
• “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” — Edgar Allan Poe, 24 March 2019.
• “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” — Henry David Thoreau, 31 March 2019.
• “It is by doubting that we come to investigate, and by investigating that we recognize the truth.” — Peter Abelard, 7 April 2019.
• “Love is blind.” — William Shakespeare, 14 April 2019.

Next Week!

The Rat is quite dead. But there is The Little Detective, and her work in finding animal smugglers Mark Trail was too busy to handle. Next week, barring emergencies, I’ll look at Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom, Sunday continuity. And if you like seeing anything about any of the story strips, they’re gathered at this link. Thanks for sticking around.

Rescued From The Spam Bin

I do sometimes remember to check the WordPress spam filters. It’s good practice, because there’s no telling how many people who’re expert Search Engine Optimization specialists are looking to help me out. One that hit me recently, though, was:

I’ll immediately clutch your rss as I can’t in finding your email
subscription link or newsletter service.

i try to load the pages using the web browser SEWERLUST 53

Now, I know this is spam, because, really, “clutch your rss”? I have an automatic RSS because who has manual? People who figure it isn’t easy enough, that’s who.

But I am intrigued by this talk of the web browser SEWERLUST 53. Particularly, what was wrong in SEWERLUST 52 that they had to do a complete rewrite? Or is it like Firefox where they download a new major-version number every time someone involved thinks of an even bigger number? There’s no way to say, which is to say, I’m not going to say. If you’d like to say, please do. We might say something.

First-Class Prize-Winning Thinking

The Post Office had a nice, big sign in the glass of the front door, which is useful as it keeps people from being scared by their views in or out of the front door through. The poster warns: “If it costs $250 to collect your prize it’s probably a scam.”

It’s the “probably” that gets me. Someone with the Post Office No Scam Bureau looked over the records and found, yeah, these first 88 money-for-prizes deals were frauds, but then here came two ones where they legitimately turned the prizes over, and the copy went from “it’s a scam” to “it’s probably a scam”.

Also, boy, you have to figure the guy running the cash-for-prizes scam who was charging just $247.85 was looking at those posters and thinking, “Whew! Under the wire! Nobody’s going to suspect me yet!”