It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Cobra Commander.
Seeing as we have the usual unfunny botched turkey gag, the Thanksgiving treat we do not need or want (sort of like the Lions game), it seems as good a time as any to talk about the failure of DbD as a fictional universe that I tried to start the previous two days but couldn't because, damn, that artwork was especially wretched.
Skye's latest "plotline" is a device that Muir's tossed out countless times before... some of the cast, usually Jan and Damon, start up some sort of career as journalists, where we are assured they will be hard-hitting seekers after 'real news' who skewer the fake liberal media conspiracy. We then get a maybe a story or two of them acting like jackasses to a straw version of a politician, and then... Muir loses interest, and the whole thing dies. Seeing as this keeps happening, you have to wonder why he keeps doing it. The answer, I'd argue is pretty simple--and yet touches on one of DbD's weaknesses as a strip. Muir does this to give members of his cast who are falling to the wayside something to do connected with the political side of the strip. It fails because Muir is a terrible writer who can't do anything with the concept, and so it generally fails to revive his interest in them.
But that's one of the fundamental problems with DbD--it's not really about much of anything anymore. It started it had a simple format--office strip with political humor. It used it badly, but, well, it still used it. Now... now it's a strange lurching thing that bumbles about to let Muir live out his laughable fantasies and spew right wing hate. It is a strip where things simply happen.
Like Sam (or her daughters) destroying a turkey every Thanksgiving.
Yeah, agreed. I initially started reading DBD back in the "old days," and while I never agreed with the right-wing politics, I still found it occasionally charming and funny. I took a break from reading it for a few years, and then came back...to this.
ReplyDeleteThe devolution of DBD mirrors what has happened to right-leaning politics in this country. In the old strip, you could still have characters with different opinions be friendly with each other. Over the years, the strip has become increasingly petty and mean, and violent. You are correct that characters like Jan and Skye, who are supposedly still Dems (and Damon, because he is black) no longer have a good role to play in this universe. But CM continues to try to keep them around, because that's one way he can pretend he's not an intolerant fascist.
More or less the same with me. I would read DBD on a semi-regular basis in the "old days", back when I was naive enough to assume that people like Muir were good-faith rational actors. Then I didn't look at it for a few years, and when I came back in 2015, I found out that it had become....whatever the hell it's become.
DeleteYes indeed, Muir's deterioration parallels what's happened to the American right in the same period. DBD is a fascinating outsider-art chronicle of a man's descent into madness, but it's also a chronicle of an entire political faction's mutation into fascism and white supremacy.
Yeah..."whatever the hell it's become" is the best way to describe it. I sometimes wonder if my fascination with it is healthy. Like staring at a tangled trainwreck of conspiracy theories and mental illness.
DeleteHe's shifted from the co-worker you avoid, to the crazy guy trying to hand you his self-published newsletter at the bus stop.
DeleteAnd don't even get me started on the turkey. The painfully obvious solution is, you know, Zed could try to cook it? But no, because patriotz must has strict gender rolez!
ReplyDelete