Mark Trail

I’m still trying to process the 80th Annual Reuben Awards. For three days in Columbus, Ohio; cartoonists, illustrators, wirters, animators, editors, and fans came together to celebrate the people who make this art from so special. The National Cartoonists Society was founding in 1946, and there was something really meaningful about marking 80 years in a city with such a deep connection to cartooning history. Columbus was an amazing host. Between the National Cartoonists Society conference, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and the energy around Cartoon Crossroads Columbus, the whole weekend felt like a love letter to the craft. And honestly, I felt like a kid in the candy store! Working with King Features means I get to be around some truly legendary creators, but imposter syndrome definitely creeps in sometimes. Then you find yourself standing in a room with cartoonists whose work you’ve admired for years, talking shop, sharing a laugh, or watching them draw for a crowd, and it all becomes altogether rewarding. King Features was proud to be represented by an incredible group of nominees: Ricardo Siri, better known as Liniers (Macanudo), Ricardo Martinez (Goomer), […]

For eight decades, Mark Trail has invited readers to step outside — into forests and wetlands, across mountain ridges and riverbanks — and see the natural world not as backdrop, but as something alive, fragile, and worth fighting for.It launched on April 15, 1946, in the New York Post, distributed to 45 newspapers. It would eventually reach nearly 500. The strip has outlasted most of what surrounded it on those pages, not by chasing trends, but by committing — from day one — to a mission that has only grown more urgent with time.We’re proud to mark this 80th anniversary. And we thought the best way to do that was to go back to the beginning — literally — and walk through what this strip has been, era by era, and why it still matters today.Day One: A Dog, a Soldier, a Strip The debut strip — April 15, 1946, St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Mark Trail, freshly returned from WWII, tracks down Dr. Tom Davis’s place to buy Andy, the St. Bernard who saved his life in the field. Six panels. Sixty words of dialogue. The entire DNA of the strip, […]