Okay, as we’ve been over before here, Mark Trail is a man of truly awesome and godly powers, able not only to bring down planes full of terrorists with petrified wood, but also gifted with the powers of Captain Planet or something, and able to turn the wicked into beavers at a whim.  Which is all by way of saying that I wouldn’t waste your time by writing about him again were it not for the fact that good ol’ Mark Trail has yet again done something completely ridiculous, by which I mean totally awesome. 

            Okay, here’s the setup, Mark Trail is good friends with an old guy who, in addition to looking like Elderly Orangutan Mark, happens to be the CEO of some company or another (in this case, we’re just going to assume its Atari and be done with it).  The second in command at Atari is played by Jonah Jameson’s uncommonly good-natured brother, Smacky Jameson.  Smacky’s wife, who we’re just going to call Skunk-Haired Devil Woman, really, really, really wants her husband to take over the company so that she can at last live in the suburbs and go to a country club (no, really, this is her entire motivation for the ensuing evil which ensues).  Now, Elderly Orangutan Mark invites Smacky and Skunk-Haired Devil Woman out on a fishing trip with him and actual Mark, and during this time, Smacky’s wife reveals her evil plot to murder Orangutan Mark so that her husband can take over the company and she can get a house in the suburbs.  It all sounds simple enough, right?  Well, it gets even weirder, as we shall see.

            You see, rather than planning some ingenious scheme to off Orangutan Mark, Devil Woman just keeps trying to henpeck her husband into killing him for her.  Seriously, they’ll all be walking along, and Orangutan Mark will say something like, “Oh, my shoelace has come untied!” and then in the next panel, Devil Woman will be yelling at Smacky, “You’re a fool a coward, you should have killed him then!”  Or maybe they’ll all be out in the woods and Orangutan Mark will go, “Dag, I sure could go for a delicious three taco parfait about now!” and Devil Woman will be shouting, “Smacky, you fool, kill him!  Kill him now!”  The scary thing is, that for about two weeks, this was pretty much the formula for Mark Trail.  Orangutan Mark is mildly inconvenienced; Devil Woman yells at Smacky, who fails to kill him; Devil Woman expresses her disappointment in strong and uncomplimentary words.  Just so you’ll know I’m not making all this up, here’s a little sample:

           Now, let’s stop for a minute here and think about how Mark Trail’s concept of reality differs from our own.  Here’s a woman who’s blatantly and totally insisting that her husband murder another man, and he’s just treating it like she wants to spend too much on a handbag.  The only thing I can think of is that since they’ve been married, she’s tried to get him to kill someone like, every other week, and so he’s just stopped noticing.  Even so, can anyone, even someone as cool as Smacky Jameson put up with such abuse forever?

            Damn, Smacky, just because you needed to put your foot down doesn’t mean you had to rip her head off like that.

            Eventually, frustrated with her husband’s lack of evil, Skunk-Haired Devil Woman takes it upon herself to drown Orangutan Mark.  When that doesn’t work, she transforms herself into a rabid raccoon and bites him after traveling back in time (okay, this isn’t shown literally, but it is implied pretty much right on through), finally smashing the radio so that Orangutan Mark will go all frothy and die in the wilderness.  Then she goes and bitches at him so loudly that a passing family of bears is embarrassed for her lack of manners.

            Mark, Ailing Orangutan Mark, and Smacky all then head out to find help, leaing Devil Woman to hold her own against a giant porcupine that looms out of the shadows and tries to eat her black and twisted soul (as giant porcupi are wont to do).

            Eventually, the three men get Orangutan Mark back to safety and come pick up Devil Woman, who tires to backhand her husband, but is foiled by his Keanu-like ability to dodge the anger of crazy women. 

           Finally, Orangutan Mark makes Smacky the head of Atari after all, and Smacky divorces his wife so he can buy one of those make out robots, like the one Will Smith had to fight last year.  Which still seems a little easy.  I mean, this woman tried to murder a dude, like, fifty times, and in the end all she gets is not married to the CEO of Atari?  That’s getting off way too easy.  Is there no justice in the world?

            But wait!  In the last strip of the story, we see Mark Trail Original Recipe back in at home with his wife Skanky Donna Reed, as he leans suggestively against a roto-tiller engine block.  Then, we get the final horrifying conclusion:  “Meanwhile, in the Swamp.”  Now, it might seem to the uninitiated that this is actually just a really sucky segue, but to all us Markheads, it actually establishes the chilling coda to the entire story; that Mark Trail has, in yet another act of divine vengeance, transformed Skunk-Haired Devil Woman into a giant woodpecker.

            So there you have it, yet another silly yet sobering morality play from that Shaman of the funny pages, Mark “I’ll turn you into wildlife” Trail.