It all started when someone wrote to The Black Mountain News of North Carolina to point out a shocking misstatement in a recent Mark Trail comic strip:
There was a very misleading cartoon in the Jan. 12 Citizen-Times. Mark Trail supposedly gives worthwhile advice about spending time in the great outdoors. This particular cartoon implied that Americans can contract river blindness from black flies in our part of the world. However, this serious disease and its vector only exist in sub-Saharan Africa and a few other tropical locales. The North American species of black flies is found in the northern tier of states and in Canada. They spread no diseases. Mark Trail should have made this clear.
As you can see from the above, that is indeed what Jack Elrod, the 90-year-old cartoonist behind the long running Mark Trail comic strip, seemed to say.
The scandal grew when we wrote this blog post. Actually there is no scandal. It is just fun to remember that Mark Trail is still being published and Jack Elrod still has his name on it and apparently still draws it. And we should all be quite thankful that we can’t actually catch river blindness in the US because it sounds awful.
Because there is still some ironic humor from the fact that Mark Trail still exists, I was surprised to find that on at least one newspaper website where it is published, the Seattle Post Intelligence, there seems to be a community that exists only to make bizarre comments on Mark Trail strips. As pastimes go, this is somewhere above watching flies buzz around a window screen and below making those rubber band bracelets all the kids are into.
Amazing that folks still want to crap on this comic strip when there are so many awful comics on the comic page that make it look like Prince Valiant in its prime. I am a comic strip art collector and frankly, Jack Elrod in his 90’s is doing strips a lot more interesting (and better drawn!) than many half his age. I still enjoy the Sunday Mark Trail and wish I could find more than two or three other Sunday comic strips worth the paper they are printed on.
Lemme get this straight…a cartoonist is still working at 90 and we want to mock that? No one can self-loathe quite like comics people….
I do believe that Mark Trail is still in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where it inspires letters like this:
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/mailbag/letters-to-the-editor/mark-trail-needs-to-spend-more-time-at-home-with/article_5133bb22-016f-5082-bb7e-4fbf29e93b22.html
Side note: I was a voracious reader of the Post-Dispatch’s comics section every day for a good 8-10 years, and I would read ever single strip BUT Mark Trail. I just couldn’t do it.
Aw man, it’s cute that you guys think Jack Elrod has anything to do with this strip anymore!
Maaaaaaaaatlock
Salute, Mr. Elrod… and here’s to old Ed Dodd!
http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/ed-dodd-1902-1991
“Because there is still some ironic humor from the fact that Mark Trail still exists, I was surprised to find that on at least one newspaper website where it is published, the Seattle Post Intelligence, there seems to be a community that exists only to make bizarre comments on Mark Trail strips.”
What?
Why is the fact that Mark Trail still exists “ironic”?
“the Seattle Post Intelligence”? The what?
Comments are closed.