Mark Trail is probably the longest-surviving strip of its kind, and maybe the only one of its kind. Part adventure strip, part mystery, part Animal Planet and with plots so simple they make the Hardy Boys seem like James Ellroy. Here’s an easy way to solve any current Mark Trail mystery: The guys with the weird facial hair that travel by small plane are guilty, especially if they’re brothers or cousins.

Still, I’m fascinated that it’s survived long enough to be a legacy strip, carried on by another generation of cartoonists, Jack Elrod. One of my favorite websites, the Comics Curmudgeon regularly pokes Mark Trail and snuffs out his campfire of adventure.

Continuing my series on cartooning and cartoonists, Ed Dodd (or someone credited as such) wrote about himself and his work back in 1964. This is pulled from an oversized saddle-stitched magazine from Allied Publications with the creatively-challenged title These Top Cartoonists Tell How They Create America’s Favorite Comics. It featured an introduction by Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker and was compiled by Allen Willette.

Here’s Dodd on Dodd:

“Mark Trail is created by not one but several writers and artists, pooling their ideas to produce the finished daily and Sunday product. Any member of my staff may come up with an appropriate idea for a sequence. It is then kicked around by the entire group until it reaches the acceptable stage. We put particular emphasis upon character in Mark Trail, and attempt to let the characters produce the dramatic quality of the stories, rather than the other way around.

“Once we have finished the sequence in my studio, it is forwarded to New York, where it is studied carefully by an editor of the Hall Syndicate. It is criticized and returned to us. Then we go into another story session, either rejecting or accepting the criticism…using our best story judgment. We then write the final draft.

“At this point the weekly ‘scenes’ are written, and frequently they are changed slightly, depending on both the art and dramatic quality improvement. These are also forwarded to New York for criticism, and are often changed in detail before the drawing is started.

“Once the weekly scenes are agreed upon, artists then lay out the art, including the balloons, in pencil. This ‘rough’ is then turned over to the letterer who puts in the finished copy. After that the drawings are completed in ink.

“I was born in Lafayette, Georgia in 1902. I studied architecture at Georgia Tech one year, and spent two years studying at the Art Students’ League in New York. Mark Trail was started in 1946.”

A few thoughts:

Dodd’s description of his work reads like a government document on how to file a tax return. It’s all very businesslike and formal. Is the process really this dull, or did Dodd somehow think that this book was some kind of 1960s history archive and he’d better sound serious. Or was cartooning so frowned upon back then, that he felt you had to talk about it like it was an office job just so people could accept it? Or was Dodd just a dullard?

I like that the story the Mark Trail staff puts together only has to reach the “acceptable” stage before it’s submitted to New York, and that input from the unnamed editor is referred to as “criticism.”

Was Mark Trail really that successful? This is from 1964 and it sounds like Ed Dodd has a pretty large staff in his studio, and it’s never mentioned what it is exactly Dodd does. There are “several writers and artists” and there’s him. What did he do?

Wikipedia names Dodd as the only writer, with Tom Hill as the artist and Jack Elrod (creator of The Ryatts) as the assistant. Elrod is now the credited artist. Wikipedia also has a photo of their office set-up and it looks like they’re all getting ready to process orders for the factory. After Hill passed away and Dodd retired, Elrod took over the strip and he’s the credited writer-artist today.

More info on the strip’s early years can be found at the Preservation for Spring Creek Forest that posts a transcript of a speech given by Tom Hill’s son. Lots of great info and some really nice art that clearly places the early Mark Trail strips in the classic adventure strip pantheon.

Here’s a 1953 newspaper article on Dodd.

And the weirdest thing to me? MAD Magazine’s Jack Davis was briefly an assistant on the strip and later parodied it in MAD.

[Artwork: publicity photo of Ed Dodd]