Thursday, November 30, 2017

"Right, Right, This Is What's Really Happening, And These Are The Real Good Guys! Yes!"

It's the Day's Day of Days!  Because encyclopedia of the Automobile.

Muir drinks deep of the crazy to tell himself that the Tycoons are our real friends.
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7 comments:

  1. JLGNovember 30, 2017 at 11:19 PM

    Good sir! Over these past few months, it has been with a mixture of sweet glee and bitter woe that I have followed your wickedly pointed jabs at the ongoing insanity train that is DAY BY DAY.

    There are times when I feel the enormity of the disaster unfolding around us is threatening my OWN mental health, to the point where I might end up as mad as Chris Muir has become. But it helps a little bit knowing that there's at least one other person out there who reads Muir's twisted opus with the same morbid fascination and wide-eyed horror.

    My only complaint about your blog? I SO wish your entries were longer. They're short and sharp, which is a good form in itself, but I'm so starved for somebody to really call attention to this bizarre piece of outsider art and really examine, in depth, its author's long, slow transition from hardcore but recognizably normal right-wing Republican into a delusional extremist crackpot completely detached from reality. (A trajectory paralleling that of American conservatism itself over the same time period.)

    It's a very lonely existence, knowing about this comic and being aghast at its incoherent brand of logic, fever-dream delusions and grotesque lack of self-awareness (and perhaps most of all, by its commenters----these people frighten me in ways I've never known how to be frightened before) and yet having no one else to talk about it with. Perhaps you have felt the same emptiness?

    Sorry for this long comment, but I can't think of another way to contact you. I would love to communicate more directly, if you're game.

    Regardless, by all means keep cataloguing Mister Muir's descent into madness. Any safety valve in these times, no matter how small, is invaluable to prevent US from going the same way.

    Best,
    JLG

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  2. John BallDecember 4, 2017 at 11:21 AM

    Much obliged.

    Having written about Muir for... years now, to the point where some links in the older entries don't work thanks to site jumps on his part, I like to think that I know more about his strip than he does. I have been on hand to witness his descent from mere crankishness during the Bush administration into full blown nuttiness during the Obama administration to... whatever the hell he's at now. While there's always been a great deal of denying everyone else's reality and asserting his own with Muir it has gotten worse as the years have gone on. Parallel to this, Muir's cast have left anything that remotely resembles a human situation to their present situation of living on a compound on the Texas border, killing immigrants and anyone who looks at them cross-eyed, while running... a BBQ, maybe? Oh, and the bad pin-ups, though those have been there since the beginning.

    It's funny to think that Muir almost made into the mainstream as a right-wing 'Doonesbury'. In all sorts of ways.

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  3. JLGDecember 4, 2017 at 8:28 PM

    Wait---they've actually killed people?!
    I really have to make time for my perpetually delayed plan to read the thing from the start to now. I used to occasionally read it from time to time over the years, but I had drifted away from it long enough to be jolted when I discovered in 2015 just how much more insane it had become. In ye olden days, when I was a bit more naïve and less embittered than today, I used to give some benefit of the doubt to Muir's analyses. Some.

    But....holy Haysoos, is THAT out the window now.

    And yeah, regarding the cast---revisiting the "office comedy" era is jarring today for all sorts of reasons, but the bizarre turns these characters' portrayals have since taken makes it reminiscent of looking at an Arizona desert before a nuke test.

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  4. JLGDecember 4, 2017 at 8:35 PM

    (I do wonder what might have gone differently if DBD had managed to crack the mainstream years back. I think it was appearing in a few papers at some point, but I don't know how long that lasted. If it had gained more momentum in that area, he would not have been able to take it in the direction it eventually went.)

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  5. John BallDecember 5, 2017 at 9:45 AM

    Considering that one of those directions is bad soft-core porn, no,no he couldn't.

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  6. John BallDecember 5, 2017 at 10:10 AM

    Also, if you're going to do a dive-through, while I freely admit the links don't work--and damn it, I'd fix it, but it would be an obscene amount of labor on my part--I've got commentary for almost every damn strip he's ever written, including the ones that he wrote before I started this strip. Just use the Year Tags as your guide. Soon you'll understand my now seldom-used gagline "Bears with Power Tools!"

    While Muir's never really risen above awful, quite a few of the old strips are just terrible incidental humor ones, made worse by the fact that his cast is awful people. Of course, he still makes strips like that but now the living situation of the cast is so surreal that even these strips now have an actual fascination to them, while in the old days it was like watching a computer trying to construct traditional comic strips from a faulty model.

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  7. JLGDecember 5, 2017 at 1:31 PM

    I disagree somewhat in that I do think buried underneath all the misanthropy, misogyny and insanity, Muir does have legit comedy chops that occasionally break through untainted. This happened, of course, far more often in ye olden days, when it was just an office comedy about the PC lib girl, her deadpan conservative foil, and the two "older" coworkers who were somewhat in the middle.

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