I had fairly recently been reminded of the old "Mark Trail" comic strip...one that I pretty much ignored when I was a kid, because Frank Cho of "Liberty Meadows" ruthlessly satirized it in an episode called "Mark Derail". Mark visited the animal sanctuary with a TV crew. He turned out to be an effete, egocentric, and truly weird character who really did not like animals and whose pipe never left his mouth. Quite funny.

This got me thinking about Mark Trail. Was it really that bad a comic?

Well, I looked it up on a few sites, like this one...

A very, very worthy contender for worst adventure comic ever...

Yup. We got a pretty odd comic here. Art that puts surprisingly wooden characters on paper, many of whom look an awful lot like Mark himself. It's hard to tell who the bad guy is sometimes. Body proportions that change mysteriously...like Mark's hands. Storylines that are so bad...that...well, I really don't know how to explain it. Just read the synopsis of any episode, and you'll see.

Some neat things. Mark is 34 years old...forever! He's been 34 for decades now. I wish I could do that. Sheesh. It must be nice. His perky and loving wife Cherry stays the same age forever too, but her hairstyle has changed with the times. That's nice. Cherry knows how to stay hip.

Mark smoked a pipe for years and years, but has given it up recently to encourage nonsmoking.

Mark's a real straight arrow. He doesn't smoke, swear, spit, scratch, or anything. His hair is PERFECT. So is his lean figure.

What a guy.

Mark is sometimes forced to resort to violence. He had a fistfight with a really BAD guy once, and it lasted a whole week in the comic strip. One punch was thrown in that week. By Mark. One punch is all Mark ever needs to unleash to lay out any bad guy. I'm not sure how it took up a whole week to depict the one punch landing on the bad guy's chin, but I'll have to see if I can find that episode online and look at the pictures.

Well, when you've got a fairly slim script to flesh out, you do the best you can, right?

It's too bad that Mark Trail could not have done a collaboration with the Famous Five. What a simply ripping episode that would have been!

Mark keeps an eye on wilderness areas, protects endangered wildlife, rescues hurt animals and lost tourists, thwarts poachers and other bad apples, and helps neighbours with their family problems. I wish I had had an uncle like Mark, by golly! He had a way of clenching that pipe casually in his perfect jaws that just demanded total hero worship.

Yup. Well, check it out. Get ready for a real treat.

Mary Worth is damn good. Brenda Starr is damn good too. Rex Morgan, M.D. is devastating. But Mark Trail smokes!!!