Naturally, it all fell apart, as club sandwiches so often do. I felt a certain bond with Bill Griffith, Zippy’s creator—like so many anomic nerds, Bill knows a lot about jazz—but I couldn’t help noticing that Bill tended to recycle the same gag a lot—like, every fucking day—and Mary, well, I read every strip, every single one, but I still couldn’t figure out the plots. They were so damn boring that I suffered from a sort of negative déjà vu. The strip seemed brand new every day, with new characters, new plot, new everything. Only Mark, steadfastly beating the crap out of lowlifes with long sideburns and substandard diction, made sense to me.
Fortunately, these days I don’t have to struggle over Mary’s haphazard plots to reap the special pleasure that comes from snickering at those less intellectually blessed than one’s self. The Comics Curmudgeon, operated by “Josh,” is a never-empty treasure box of snark directed at Mary and Mark and all their ilk, most notably Apartment 3G, Rex Morgan, Judge Parker, the Family Circus, and Gil Thorp.*
There’s now an entire website devoted to making fun of Mary, which is a little too intense for me. A while back a team of talented actors re-enacted five Mary strips. Whether they went on to gratifying careers in regional dinner theater or drove off a cliff chugging Johnny Red straight from the bottle is a bit up in the air. There’s also an independent site devoted to Gil Thorp, not quite as fun as it used to be, now that the artist who drew the strip in a baffling, neo-Gothic woodcut style has hung up his stylus.
Those independent sites don’t quite work for me because I just can’t handle those strips on a daily basis. Once a week is better. Mark Trail is the only one I can take straight. I’m mesmerized by the strip’s bizarre plots, which march straight up to utterly forbidden territory and then lurch wildly aside at the last moment. A couple of years ago, Mark fell into the clutches of a gaggle of no-neck knuckle-walkers down on the bayou who literally pitched him into a pigpen! Ow! Being made to squeal like a pig by a pig? That’s too much irony! Somehow, Mark managed to escape with his britches on, not to mention rescuing a busty Ellie Mae look-alike, whose skintight cutoffs were enough to make a grown man cry, from the clutches of her country cousins, who obviously had a lot more than kissin’ on their minds.
Oh, and then there was the time Mark and his wife Cherry went on this yachting cruise and the cook was this French fag who kept talking about his “pussy”! Yeah, his fucking cat! Of course! What else could it be? Because the word “pussy” means “cat”!
But the pièce de résistance of Mark’s saga is, of course, his former girlfriend Kelly Welly, always trying to prove that a woman can be as good at outdoor journalism as a man, poor idiot, not to mention trying to fuck everything in pants. Only in Mark Trail could a woman sluttier than Paris Hilton remain a virgin.
Afterwords
Back in the early days of the web, a passionate soul known only as “the nameless obsessive-compulsive” took to compiling insanely detailed weekly synopses of Mark Trail. Once the Washington Post started running Mark’s daily strips in full color, a development the NOC pronounced to be “better than going to Oz,” he laid aside the oar, his labor complete. The site hasn’t been updated in quite a while, but if you’ve been wanting to read insanely detailed weekly synopses of Mark Trail’s daily strip, well, now you can.
If you want to download old radio adventures of Mark Trail, go here. And if you want to visit a site that makes fun of individual Mark panels on a fitful basis, go here.
*Be warned that the Comics Curmudgeon features lots of photos of fat, middle-aged people with bad haircuts wearing tee-shirts that Josh sold them. Well, if it helps Josh meet the payments on his new Porsche, I’m all for it.
