Mark Trail

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, […]