CSotD: The Call of the Wild
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When cartoonists and cartoon fans talk about their early influences or the ones that really got them interested in comics as a medium, the strips you hear about tend to be the groundbreakers, like Barnaby, Pogo, and Peanuts.
I liked those strips, though I only saw Barnaby in a collection my parents had and Walt Kelly's playful fonts made characters like the Deacon or P.T. Bridgeport indecipherable to my unpracticed eyes. And all three were obscure enough in their references that a little tyke was apt to enjoy the pictures more than to appreciate what was actually going on: I remember "Miss Peach" and "Family Circus" as being more generally accessible to my young mind and still-evolving sense of humor, if not as likely to inspire dreams.
But the one I really pored over was the Sunday Mark Trail. I don't know if the strip was carried in our paper during the week, but the continuing stories that run Monday through Saturday are a different strip entirely and, whether it deserves quite as much repeat attention from on-line snark merchants as it gets, the daily is not very good.
The Sunday incarnation, however, is a terrific way to pass on nature lore and, for a little boy growing up in the backwoods of the Adirondacks, it was a chance to see the things I saw around me in the funny papers and to learn more about them.
Much of what appeared in the comics was archetypal and, like seeing something on "Lassie" or reading a familiar plot in a children's novel, you recognize it because it is recognizable because you've seen it on TV or read it in a kids' book before.
In the case of comic strips, JC Dithers could kick Dagwood's ass around the office and I didn't think that happened where my daddy worked, nor did I really think a kid like Iodine could get away with being such a wiseass for very long in real life. I enjoyed them for what they were, but I didn't take them seriously. They were comics.
But Mark Trail hit on local animals often enough that I read the strip as part of my life. If I was out in the woods and started up what we referred to generically as a "partridge," the loud explosion of its wings would nearly stop my heart, but I also knew that it was probably really a ruffed grouse and I had a pretty good idea of what it had been doing before I came along.
At a very young age, I knew the difference between the holes a woodpecker made finding food and the ones he'd make excavating a nest, and I also could see, high in the trees, the broad, bare places where a porcupine had gnawed away the bark. And, if I turned over a log or squatted down to peer into a pool of water, I knew what a lot of those little creatures were, in part because of some of the Golden Nature Guides I had, but in large part from reading Mark Trail.
And I did branch out, but Mark Trail was the starting point. I suppose I was nine or 10 when I got a subscription to "Sports Afield," a magazine I would see at the barber shop. Every year the school had subscription drives and our folks would let us pick out a magazine, in part to support the school and in part to encourage us to read. I probably had the "Sports Afield" subscription for a couple of years, as part of a fairly prolonged period during which I wanted to go to the New York State Ranger School, which was about eight miles from my house.
Mark Trail came before all that, and it's an excellent presentation of material. In fact, a few years ago, an education tech at an elementary school brought me in to consult on a lesson plan in which third-graders would create cartoons telling the biographies of local inventors, and I pointed her to Mark Trail for a format: Several small panels that build into the larger "what it all means" panel.
It worked for the kids because it's a great format for learning through a single, standalone graphic. Has been for 65 years.
I don't know how many Sunday comic sections Mark Trail is in, though when I included it in the comics for a paper I was working at, it took a follow-up call to get them to adjust the page lay out so that its more generous, old-style format was not squished and misproportioned in the name of cramming as many comics as possible into the least number of pages.
I wish the powers-that-be would tap into the general interest in nature and the environment as well as the growing movement to bring kids back to the countryside and recognize this strip as something that could make a difference.
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