Nudity/Scanty Clothing Causing Traffic Accidents Is Pretty Much Her Business Model.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Trail of the Tiger.

It's not just that this is a lazy punchline that he's done before. It's that this is the laziest way he's ever done it.

The Transition Era; Part 3: A Place Where We Can Buy Nuts And Screws.

 So to return to our tale of the strip, when we last left Muir he'd gleefully burnt down his old setting, destroying the (admittedly vaguely defined) corporate structure that had provided the base to DbD for five years and a couple months, in no small part because it had proven a cage. Having done this profound act of artistic liberation... he then swiftly erected a new cage, more or less subjecting the strip to a soft reboot.

What has to be understood is that the Muir of 2008 was just not as gloriously unhinged, insanely overconfident and profoundly isolated as he would become. While there was doubtless a part of him that wanted to leap into the action/Right Wing propaganda strip of his dreams, I'd argue two things held him back. Firstly, Muir seems to have felt that at this time that, sure, he'd just watched his time in syndication end in absolute disaster, but he'd be back, sure, so what he should do is make a few changes and wait for the inevitable calls. There were, after all, practical reasons he hadn't led with a potential adventure strip. Secondly, a combination of the familiarity he'd developed with the overall rhythm of the situational gag-a-day setup and likely some worries about whether he was up to writing a genuine action strip kept him in what he imagined was a a safe zone.

It wasn't, he was terrible a gag-a-day writer, so this was more 'his delusions were more small-scale' than 'he saw things clearer then'.

And so, to build things up, over that last week of the Mystery Business(tm) Era, Zed explained to Sam that he was going to have to get a temp job. At Home Depot.

It might strike you that someone who'd been working at design at what appeared to be a high level for a fairly lengthy period of time would actually have pretty good career prospects, and should instead be focusing on getting rehired in his field. It actually did occur to Sam, who brought up, only to have her husband mansplain that companies were skewing younger, making his lengthy background in his chosen profession functionally useless. Which... sure, okay. Fine. It's bullshit, but it's bullshit that at least has some element of logic in it. It scans, even if it doesn't stand up to examination.

The other problem is that Zed is an elite sniper with skills so valuable the government decided his 45 year old ass needed to be in an active combat zone. In the real world--this creates job opportunities. Even if you toss out having him actively serve in combat again (and Muir will not do that, as we have seen and will see) getting a job as an instructor--either in the military or the private sphere--seems like a natural choice. And that's off the top of my head. There are limitless possibilities here.

But no. Zed wasn't going to do that. He was going to work in a Home Depot. A place where, he noted immediately, he had to lie because he knew nothing about hardware. (We will be dealing with the oddity of this phase of Captain Mitty in due time.) To support a household that not only included a wife and twin girls, but also a lazy sister-in-law who frequently just hung around, did no work, and yet somehow it never occurred to them to say 'Get out'. So, yes, brilliant plan. Truly, he is a font of good sense and common wisdom. What an answer. A temp job at Home Depot that he didn't have the credentials or skills for. That would wind up lasting for roughly two years. 

...

This era regularly makes my brain hurt, folks. It manages to be as fundamentally wrong as later eras, but without the same manic energy, and that... just... hurts.

Moving away from the various structural failings of this setup, it's pretty easy to see WHY Muir did this. To start with, he was likely aware, on some level at least, that the Mystery Business(tm) Era had suffered from a certain uniformity of the cast--the Core Four were all a bunch of white collar urban professionals, living and operating in the same sphere. Damon and Jan were clearly in a higher social class than Sam and Zed, even before it was revealed that Jan's father had the wealth of a small (or possibly a medium-sized) nation at his disposal--but not an extraordinarily higher one. (Indeed, it has to be noted that even after the retcon, much as Jan continued to be written as 'white' despite being labeled 'Hispanic', she continued to be written as 'comfortable upper-middle class' despite being labeled as 'multi-billionaire'.) This resulted (even aside from Muir's ideological and artistic limitations) in a flattening of the cast's perspectives--it was all middle class urban professional, all the time. Adding a more blue collar point of view would help correct this. As for why he simply had Zed and Sam suddenly dye their collars instead of introducing new characters, at least part of it was he was still operating from the same lazy script of the Mystery Business(tm) Era. You know, the script he ran when he decided turning Sam and Jan into minorities (but not really) solved the strip's diversity problems.

BUT... there was another reason. An emotional reason that likely any critic would start considering the moment they saw what had happened. Discussing it would almost feel like a cheap shot--except I've followed this strip for over two decades' worth of work, and seen Zed end up at 'defiant country boy rancher/sniper death god', so yeah, it's an unavoidable conclusion. Muir didn't want his author avatar to be a white-collar cubicle-dwelling wage slave anymore. Like many men of his particular generational creche (the Late Boomers/fringe Early Gen X types), Muir clearly felt these professions were alienating from traditional masculinity. It was off-putting enough to be working in advertising, which yes, was Muir's job job in these days. To have his fictional skinsuit doing a variation of the same routine had likely become quietly distressing, another reason to shutter Mystery Business(tm) and move Zed to standing around and asking people if they needed help at a Home Depot, something Muir likely saw as deeply authentic in some manner.

In a very real sense, even as Muir was starting to enjoy being able to alter his fictional universe on a whim, he remained limited in the scope and the ambition of doing so. He was still operating on the same assumptions that had produced El Dorado Dad's ridiculous financial maneuvers, resulting in impossibilities that were absurd, but not fantastic, a la Father Brown's famous dictum involving the impossible meeting between Gladstone and Queen Victoria. The Plot Coupons that Don Portago had produced so far are not surreal and wildly imaginative feats. They are the imaginary self-indulgent actions of an imaginary rich man springing from the mind of an ignorant, arrogant person who worships wealth and has a shallow, smugly cynical of what it can do, and an inability to understand its limitations and the complexity of certain aspects of the real world. So too Zed's new job--Muir assuming that employment would simply work like this. He wanted Zed to be working at a not great paying blue collar job in the manner of an early 90s sitcom, and landed on this. That it made no sense and violated his character's core situation did not matter.

And this was the less painful half of the Owens' household dynamic. What Sam was up to... Well, we'll deal with that in the future.

"Imagine It! Every Student On Their Way To Watch The JMS Fightin' Narcos Seeing The Mayor Get Dissed!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Return of the Riddle Rider.

This is Muir's idea of a cutting and witty vengeance, a childish insult in balloon form. Even he seems to notice he's lost the plot here on some level, though I assume he will soon depict this as being SO DEVASTATING to his latest hate object, Mayor Not-Xir.

Again, Charming Family Values.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fire Fighters.

Perfect. Now we're not only getting the standard DbD sleazy business, we're getting nostalgia for DbD sleazy businesses past.

Those Good Ol' Fashioned Family Values...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Blake of Scotland Yard.

Ahh, yes, Muir returning to the old well of 'Let's start up a horny business'. Like the dog to its vomit, et cetera, et cetera.

The Uncanny Valley Of Human Relations.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Radio Detective.

...

I have said it on multiple occasions--Muir has never been that good about having the cast interact with each other, but over the last decade it's gotten downright off-putting, especially the moments like that when he's clearly aiming for warm and happy.

In This Family, They Show How Wholesome They Are By Othering Members Who Don't Conform!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Officer 444.

And the awful joke about the woman who murdered her kids is a relief because it puts an end to the antisemitism.

For now.