As most of you who’ve been keeping up with teacupmammoths for a while now probably know, Mark Trail is the most thoroughly awesome nature-oriented superhero ever.  Seriously, he’s not like all those hyper eco-sensitive ones like Captain Planet, Jimmy Carter, and Aqua-Man, he still goes fishing and throws petrified trees at airplanes now and then.  Anyways, it happens to be the case that while he spends most of his weeks involved in incredibly long and ridiculous storylines.  The present one (which involves what has to be the least well-planned murder ever to be attempted in the funny pages by a woman with a double racing stripe in her hair) will most certainly be the topic of a rambling, long, and completely silly blog by myself after it finally finished up sometime near the end of 2007.

            But that’s all beside the point, which is this: that every Sunday, Mark, in reverence for the Sabbath day, holds of beating up people with sideburns for a day and instead goes all full color to explain stuff about nature to us.  Now, usually (by which I mean every single time ever in the course of human history up to this point) Mark just walks through the forest, surrounded by gigantic monster wildlife while explaining some important facts about whatever animal he seems to have found this week.  Generally, it includes a lot of lines like this, “Hamsters, though widely prized for their ability to survive in the harsh vacuum of space, are also a natural source of riboflavin and can be used to ward off the minions of Satan.”  This past Sunday however, Mark Trail seems to have gone completely off-topic, because instead of telling us about how orcas were first built by the ancient Mesopotamians, or how toothpaste was originally inspired by baboons, Mark Trail just goes off on this completely random tangent about caffeine.  And it’s not like it ties into the whole “surrounded by animals” thing at all.  It’s just caffeine.  Take a look:

My guess is that Mark was just really tired and hung over that day, and so while he was supposed to be talking about how throwing axes at rabbits is a fine thing to do with the kids, or how a homemade forest meth lab can often attract enormous hell squirrels, he was just too strung out and tired to do it and kept rambling on about caffeine.  Really, it just makes so little sense that it confuses me just looking at it.  Why on Earth is Mark Trail wandering around in nature like this, yet talking about caffeine, which, as I recall from Crap You Can’t Make Out of Trees and Weasels 101, is found nowhere in nature (except for Starbucks).

So then, we have to wonder, has Mark merely gone flippin’ loony, or is there something else going on here, something so sinister that even Mark Trail can’t just come out and warn us about how important it is.  Let’s take a closer look then, at the last panel, the one where Mark is brewing himself a iced double viente mocha latte in front of his tent.  And, of course – Great googly moogly!  It’s a bear!  It’s being attracted by the sweet, sweet aroma of the coffee!  Yes, that must be it; look, even Mark Trail himself is running away (or possibly flying away on a wisp of smoke, the picture doesn’t really make it that clear), so well does he know the ferocity of a bear separated from his coffee!

What’s that you say?  You doubt that bears so completely lust after coffee?  Well then, let’s just take a minute and review the facts Mr. Bears-Don’t-Like-Coffeerson.  First, let’s recall the tragic tale of Davy Crockett, who, as the song goes, was killed in a bar when he was only three.  A coffee bar.  Who could possibly kill a person in a coffee bar?  The only kind of folks that go to those are emo kids, Davy Crockett, me when I’m getting dumped by some girl, and bears.  Now, emo kids rarely went and lived in the wild frontier, owing to the paucity of angst out yonder in the early days, and all the coffee bars I’ve ever been dumped in were here in Virginia, which really is neither wild, nor a frontier, nor has it been either since about 1644.  Which once again, leaves us with bears.  Yes, clearly, a bear came into the coffee bar and mauled young Davy Crockett, and now, all these years later, another, or possibly the same immortal death bear, is on the loose once more.

Now normally, Mark Trail would be the first to warn us of this, but I’ll bet he’s been taken hostage by the bear, who wanted Mark to use his awesome powers of persuasion to do a strip about caffeine and how delicious it is.  That way, after everyone read the strip and made a bunch of coffee, the bear could just wander around, mauling innocent people and getting all high off caffeine.  But no bear is smarter than Mark Trail (except for Yogi Bear, perhaps, or that one Care Bear who went rogue a few years back), and so, though the bear was sitting right there off screen, probably holding a flaming 2x4 wrapped in barbed wire, Mark Trail cleverly snuck in a warning to all of us out in comics land who love coffee and hate bears, as all true red-blooded Americans should (the Russians, of course, are just the opposite; they start every day with a freshly brewed cup of bears, and never go out into the woods alone lest they be eaten by a ravenous cup of Taster’s Choice).  Now, there’s probably a good lesson in here somewhere, or at least a funny ad idea (We’ve replaced Mark’s Folger’s flavor crystals with a bear, let’s watch and see if he notices the difference. “Mmm, this tastes better than usuaaaaaaaagh!”), but instead I’m just going to end with a warning: Watch the skies - For bears.

And lastly, lest you start thinking that Mark Trail is too wholesome to be interesting, I leave you with this, the most disturbingly weird Mark Trail strip I could find anywhere on the internet: