The Mark Trail reaches a dead end?

Back in the states, suited up, Mark Trail begins to undermine his existence.

NooooooooooooOOOOO!

All this insipid strip needs is one more day — one miserable day! — to reach five straight months of nothingness. And it's just going to peter out now? A storyline equivalent of sap rising in a tree has ended, not with a bang or a whimper. What's less than a whimper?

This story held so much promise! Well, not promise exactly, but interest. No, not that either. Let's just say it held stubbornly to a space in the Sacramento Bee comics section, below the fold.

To recap: Almost five months ago — five months! In time as we humans perceive it! — outdoor magazine writer Mark Trail found a wounded goose with a gold leg band inscribed with a Bible passage. Lengthy uninteresting investigation brought him and his mottled crew of friends and co-workers to an idyllic valley in remotest Canada, where mountain lions lie with the mountain goats and all is peace under the rule of a buckskin-clad old woman named Mother McQueen. Yes, that one, mama to Canadian Mounted Police Officer McQueen.

Except nosy reporter Kelly Welly, on evidence so thin it didn't even exist, concluded that Mother McQueen's muzzled bear — kind of a diss on this dystopia — is trained to haul gold ore from a mine under a waterfall that irrigates the idyllic valley. Kelly somehow forced the bear to lead her to the mine. Turns out wolves were not part of this idyll, because a pack attacked the muzzled and, therefore, defenseless bear. No problem: Mark Trail came upon the scene just in time sics his St. Bernard, Andy, and an as-yet-unseen dog, Princess, who together chased off the howling pack. Of course.

That was climax of this nothing story, it develops, because afterward Mother McQueen, serving a fine feast of peace-loving animals, confessed to all that the gold mine is just a played-out hole yielding only enough gold for her poor departed husband to have minted only a couple of bird bands. For some reason or another. Ho hum.

In the end, Mark Trail, who makes his living digging up stories that he can write for an outdoor magazine — and who defied arrest to be allowed into this strange valley — decided after nearly five months of lethargy and nothingness that not only won't he write a story about the discovery, but he will forbid Kelly Welly from publishing any photos, lest any other nosies ever want to explore this mysterious valley. In today's strip,  Mark is at his editor's office, heading off Kelly's attempts to file a story, with photos that'll ruin everything.

In the Mark Trail world, the editor will congratulate Mark for wasting all his time and producing nothing. Mark might even get paid hush money, but it will be called something else. Kelly will be fired, or sent to the secretarial pool, where in this world still exists a vast grid of typewriter-topped desks. 

(It later turns out that Mark stole the memory card from Kelly Welly's camera, even though she was doing her job, gathering information for a story, for which she would be paid, and doing nothing illegal or untoward. But Mark's theft is somehow OK and virtuous, because he's already off on the next unadventure.)

I predict I will mourn the cumulative seven minutes and 14 seconds I have wasted following this strip do nothing for nearly five months, and will vow never to read it again. And will break that vow.

(Find fun Mark Trail commentary here.)

Encouraging signs

A sign, serving its humble purpose! Success!

Two-thirds of the signs I illustrated for Old Sacramento have been installed. Hoo! Ray!

The signs went up at Pioneer Park (right) and at the Lauriet Assay Office. I know you join me in anxious vigil for the Waterfront Park signs to appear. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Seeing the signs for the first time last week, I did three things:

1. Wiped off pollen and smudges with my shirttail,
2. Wondered morbidly when someone would deface them, and
3. Realized they are awash in a great ocean of signs in Old Sacramento; so many signs, each so different from the next, you'd think they're what holds up the buildings.

Named for a bakery … that occupied
the site next door.

These new signs are necessarily understated, a dark chocolate on a cream background, designed by Lisa Park to blend in to the 19th Century surroundings, and then become visible to provide handy information the moment visitors wonder what the heck they're looking at.

Though I understand that, I wouldn't mind a little neon, or maybe another sign telling visitors, "Hey! Look at this cool sign!"

As I guide visitors through Underground Sacramento (in the character of an Irish lout-turned-clerk) I tell them with a wink the signs are new and that I'm familiar with the artist's work.

Though the signs are pebbles in a pond, I'm happy knowing they're part of a much larger long-term plan to reveal more of the lunatic history of Sacramento, in which founders built too close to the Sacramento and American rivers, and solved the problem of their own making by lifting the city out of the floodwaters.

A good place for a sign answering,
"What the heck is this?"

Eventually, as The Sacramento Bee reports, the state would like to re-establish two levels of the city in what seems like an empty lawn at Front and I streets in the heart of the old city — the 1849 level of the city, where foundations are still intact, and the post-1864 city level, some 20 feet above.

I'm hoping sooner than later, and that the economy turns around to make it so.