"Dey Babies!" He Whines.

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

As Muir comforts himself that, yeah, yeah, things are going well, people are on HIS side, let's consider the many fails of this little strip.

Muir imagines he comes across as reasonable. He comes across as a bloodthirsty fascist.

Muir imagines he comes across as mature and his opponents as entitled and childish. In fact, not only does he come across entitled and childish, but his dismissal of his opponents as that underlines his moral vacuity and hypocrisy. Muir will shriek about how he is being tyrannically oppressed because his every bigoted whim isn't being indulged, but when actually tyrannical oppression is occurring, he won't merely applaud because his people are doing it. No, he'll whine that it isn't going far enough because anyone who doesn't agree with him isn't being liquidated.

Muir imagines that he comes across as calm and serene. In fact he comes across as panicked, because anyone who knows his work has seen this before--Muir shutting his eyes as the failures pile up and insisting that glorious victory is inevitable.

Stuff That Is Totally Happening, He's Sure Of It.

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

Muir appears to have fallen for an online rumor hook, line, and sinker. Let's put aside the fact that the New IRA, the present group that actually occasionally does terrorism, has about 200 members, which makes its ability to perform this threat... shall we say, doubtful. The actual IRA--well, IRAs, there have been quite a few splinter groups--is a generally left-wing organization with traditional ties to the Palestinian liberation movement, who are largely more interested in getting the British out of Northern Ireland so the island can be united than this sort of blood and soil bullshit. But hey, Muir is convinced he just loves the Irish, so he falls for this. Which by the way, is largely being represented as coming from Irish and British intelligence sources. (Hell, fun fact, most of the Irish/Norn Iron bigot squad are resentful of this, and are convinced this is a government plot to tie them with being... terrorists!) But again, Muir thinks this is a cool thing, and more proof of how people everywhere are getting With It, and so we get this weird and horny gushing over the idea.

Do Not Tell These People About Bidets.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Lion's Claws.

It's interesting to try and parse what Muir views as "respecting another's culture", because this strip is so blatantly hypocritical you're left holding air. In the end of course the old equation--Muir demands everything from others, while insisting that nothing be required of him, and if this isn't followed, then he considers himself horribly oppressed.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 21: Icarus Descends, Or The Brief Period Of Syndication Ends In Failure.

Now, I mentioned that Muir took most of October off. While the exact reason for that isn't clear, it probably had something to do with DbD being pulled from syndication in that very month, and him working to shift to its new, purely online existence. 2007 had earlier seen Muir take a break in February as a result of his trip to Iraq, during which he reprinted older comics. The October break saw no such practice. It was (and is) simply a void in that year's calendar.

So what lead to this sudden fall? Well, obviously, nobody's come forward and given a full account, and I suspect that whoever told Muir it was happening gave him a line of guff, but I don't think it's a coincidence that this came after a strip depicting Hillary Clinton in blackface acquired a great deal of notoriety. (Muir was doing another variation of his "Democrats are the real racists" spiel, incidentally, as well as his usual bashing of Hillary.) That said, I think Muir's ability to produce stupid controversy was the final straw, not the sole cause. The fact was that DbD was an unfunny, badly drawn mess and wasn't catching on--the sympathetic newspaper owners who'd given it a chance were likely finding it an embarrassment even before Muir made it a notorious one. In truth, Muir had been fortunate to get syndicated at all, the recipient of the sort of favoritism he was constantly insisting minorities and women got. As I've noted, the search for a Right-Wing Doonesbury has gifted a lot of hacks chances they didn't deserve. Muir was just one of them.

I'd argue the end of syndication and its psychic effects of Muir almost certainly played a role in the shuttering of Mystery Business(tm). (Though as I plan on noting there were others.) And it also definitely fueled Muir's persecution complex, though this remained in its nascent state in the immediate future. But for broader effect--the strip's brief flirtation with mainstream relevance ended, and honestly, to much of the world, DbD barely left a ripple. It would move to an online space that would simply get crazier and crazier as the years passed.

Ironically, the most lasting effects that syndication wrought on the strip were the earliest, from the changes in Jan and Sam's ethnicity, and perhaps the most visually striking, the move to full Sunday strips. For the first three years and two months of its existence, while DbD had Sunday strips, they were standard single-rowed ones. Early in 2006, one year into syndication, the strip began to have full Sundays, though many of the initial batch are lost--for the first six months, the full Sundays ran for one day on the site only and then were replaced by the opening panels only. (Muir mentioned a plan to bring the full comics back to the site, but never did it.) This was almost assuredly about making sure the strip remained in the comic section on Sundays, instead of getting shuffled to the editorial page. But of course, Muir kept up with it afterwards.

Indeed, it's safe to say the brush with syndication would help annihilate the foundations of the strip as it had been. But then, Mystery Business(tm) had been on shaky ground for awhile, as we're going to see.

A Mind Caught In Its Own Awfulness.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Bull's Eye.

Muir's ability to be self-righteous about being wretched has always been a thing, it's just that the wretchedness has gotten oh, so worse over the years.

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.