He Thinks His Arrogant, Unthinking Bigotry Shows How Clever And Righteous He Is.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Brass Bullet.

As Muir insists that people who do in fact exist don't exist, I feel I must mention that at various points in his life Vlad III Tepes was the sworn vassal of the Ottoman Sultan...

That Is, In Fact, Not What The Quran Says.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Voice on the Wire.

As we watch Muir repeat the Right-wing urban legend that pork functions as some sort of Muslim kryptonite, let's recall that I'm pretty sure it was Sam who drove the feral hogs in there originally.

But then, as we keep seeing, time and space are bendable in DbD and causality can be warped at will.

The Point Is... Urrr, Yeah, There's A Point.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Gray Ghost.

Sometimes, Sam really gets to revel in the crossgender Id thing. And moments like these tend to be just those times, Muir trying to demonstrate that he's smart and learned, he is, but also rough and In Your Face.

Astonishingly, Muir Is Sure Everything Was Great When Muir Was A Kid.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Red Ace.

And Muir once again demonstrates that Sam is now on Marvel's comic time, where her age can vary wildly from strip to strip. Of course, we've seen Muir wax sentimental about the 1970s before, the era where he was a kid--but an old enough kid to have some freedom. And by the time he stopped being a kid during it, Jimmy Carter was in charge, so Muir could tell himself all the bad things were his fault. Because, obviously, this is a stunningly simplistic, naive, even incorrect summation of the 1970s.

Another thing poking out is that Muir misses large swathes of what the society of the New Deal built that his people have been working to destroy. But he can't accept that, so he has to tell himself that it was great despite all that "socialism" and also, if we bring back the racism, things will be good again. Hence his continued allegiance to the people trying to do that, despite the fact that they keep failing.

To quote, Dylan, only a pawn in their game.

The 'Terminator' References Shall Flow.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Mystery Ship.

It's kind of amazing how much of this comic is now just references to two movies, over and over and over...

He Knows He's Unhappy, And He Knows It Can't Be His Fault In Any Way.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Liberty, A Daughter of the USA.

There's a fascinating element to all this pathetic whining, as Muir talks about actual problems, just you know, upside down and backwards. It's all in an effort to avoid admitting that the things he's been cheerleading are what's making the problem worse, and it's hard to get the feeling that at the bottom of him, Muir knows the project's failing. But again, he can't admit his ideals don't work, so we get the phantom conspiracies and the woo.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 20: Home Again, Muir Retcons Sam Young, And There Are Much Shenanigans.

The Iraq storyline wrapped up in a sluggish fashion over the course of September and October, with Muir repeating the same points he'd made throughout as he brought things to a close.  Things were made more sluggish as Muir wound up taking a sizable break at the start of October, which we will explore in greater depth later. But in November, Zed was back home, reunited with his wife, who had been joined by her mother and had been retconned to be 39.

Sam's mother was... well, much like Jan's father, a stereotypical foreigner speaking slightly broken English leavened with words from her native tongue. (Hence my giving her yet another Superfriends nickname, Samurai Mom.) She would stick around on the margins of the strip for most of the same reasons he did, but that's for another story. Sam's age retcon...

Well, Muir had likely realized that having a 45 year old woman cheerfully going through her first pregnancy as if it were no big deal might not quite work, and so shaved six years off Sam's age. The explanation of why Sam had lied about her age to Zed for so long was strange, convoluted and nonsensical, which is probably why Muir never bothered explaining her future age-downs, just doing them. (We will talk of this again.) Notably, this still left Sam and Skye with about a decade and a half between them, but then, as that whole nonsensical explanation offered in the retcon makes clear, Muir's fictional universe does not bear any examination.

And then, having reunited his cast, Muir had Sam go into labor at the airport, the cast rushed to the hospital, and Sam and Zed finally spawned the twins. It was all very much in what I've come to call the 'Sitcom from Hell' vein, where Muir manages to meld a great deal of hackneyed, obvious humor and situations only done slightly off, and with the deep unpleasantness that is the cast's calling card. As things finally wrapped up and the cast settled in...

They all got the news that Mystery Business(tm) had folded. 

Yep, we're hitting the end of the era, folks.