...So This Is Some Elseworld Or Dream Sequence Then, And Thus Irrelevant. Got It.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Heroes of the Flames.

I find myself reiterating that I remember a time when most of the female cast didn't want to fuck Zed.

A Retcon That Explains Nothing.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Finger Prints.

As I look at this bizarre flashback, I am left baffled where he's going with this, and debating why I should care, as there's an excellent case he'll about-face either immediately or in the near future. There are only two things this strip leaves me sure of--firstly, Muir's as tangled in his constantly altered internal chronology as most casual readers would be. And secondly, he at least partially regrets getting rid of Skye's tattoos when he decided he was going to make her an upstanding citizen.

In His Mind, The Founding Fathers Are Crude Assholes, Just Like Him.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Indians Are Coming!

...As I said yesterday, when you strip out the newer, purer strain of antisemitism Muir's been injecting into the strip, this is very much his usual tactic when he's afraid bad things are coming for he and his. Whining that the GOP is all traitors to whatever the best and proper form of Right Wing is at the moment.

POSTSCRIPT--Muir's expanded on this from where I first saw it, and yet the fascinating thing is how empty all this pseudo-scholarship is, a man shouting bigoted nonsense he has heard third or fourth hand and thinking this proves what an insightful scholar of the human condition he is.

Once Again, I Thought She Was Named After Eva PERON.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Terry of the Times.

Moving on from the deranged antisemitism on display, you know Muir's feeling grim, because he's pulling out the exact 'both sides' script he uses when he feels a loss coming up to try and make himself feel like he was never REALLY affiliated with the people about to eat an L.

It never works. It just makes him even more peevish and desperate.

The Transition Era; Part 5: A New Way To Insist News Media Sucks And Muir Could Do It Better!

 So we move onto Jan and Damon, in what is the last Era where they will be central characters. At the start of the Compound Era, they will have already declined into supporting cast, and by the time we reach the Gunpowder County Era, they will be cameo fodder. And looking at what happens here, it's easy to see what Muir's basic idea was. This was again, essentially, a soft reboot, and he was going to try and return the cast into new versions of their original functions. Sam and Zed were going to go back to being 'slice of life' characters who occasionally did politics, and Jan and Damon were going to serve as DbD's primary political story engine. And that means taking a look at the pair's politics and characters at this point.

Damon is easy. As I said, he is unique among the original Core Four in not changing. But Transition Era Jan exists in a very special space, much like the Era itself. She has not completely shifted into being the liberal who agrees with everything the Right says and thinks her own side are radicals, crooks and wretches. Oh, that is gradually becoming her primary function, but not yet. She will still occasionally spout a bad approximation of a liberal policy or belief so that it may be mocked and attacked. And sometimes she will do something that's a sort of mashup, uttering what Muir imagines is the maximum allowable liberalism a person can have while not being an evil fool. To turn back the clock a bit, at the end of the Iraqi arc, to preserve an illusion of nuance Jan doesn't become an out-and-out supporter of the war.  She declares that she still feels that obviously the US shouldn't be there. But she then states that just as obviously the troops are doing a bang-up job, and they obviously all believe in the cause, and you'd have to be fool to see it differently--in essence, declaring all the propaganda depicted valid. 

As one can see, this is neither a sustainable nor an intellectually honest position for the character, and yes, by the end of the era, Jan will have moved almost completely to her new role of 'Fox News Liberal'. But another aspect is with the combination of this ongoing character reform, which left her in a strange and vague state of flux, and the loss of her job destroying almost all of her non-political character boundaries, Jan wound up emphasizing the closest approximation to a character trait she had left. She began to constantly remind people that she had been in marketing. Constantly. Over the next half-decade, one of Jan's most common character beats was mentioning marketing. It was a fascinating bit where Muir was actually doing something amusing, but not by intent. Everything it seemed had to do with marketing to Jan, in the manner of the famous episode of Car 54, Where are You? where we find everything reminds Officer Gunther Toody of Lower Manhattan at sunset, from the Jersey side.

Of course the other amusing bit is that as Jan had now shifted to the 'Good and Clever' side of the equation, everyone kept insisting now that Jan was just a wiz at marketing. This is structurally funny, firstly because anyone reading the old strips can see the cast's (and Muir's) contempt for what they saw as Jan's unproductive, immaterial role in the firm, an attitude that was being quietly magicked away. But even more amusing was a simple fact--it had been all but stated in the early years of the strip that Jan was bad at her job. It was a big part of her schtick, the wannabe liberal savior who thought she was a master at selling things who wasn't. And now, just as the cast were acting as if they'd always respected her career, they also were pretending she'd always been great at it. Which of course, led to the final bit--Muir clearly has no idea what marketing actually does, so the audience was subjected to Jan using 'marketing' the way that Golden Age comics used 'radiation' as a vague buzzword. 

The other point to remember is that the pair's relationship continued to be a deeply uncomfortable thing throughout this time, with Damon continued to treat his girlfriend--and later wife--with various brands of disrespect. The horndog advances continued. So did the belittling of her views.

So with Transition Era Jan and Damon pretty much laid out, the question then becomes... what does Muir do with these two characters in the new era?

Why, he has them start a podcast of course. Naturally. Who wouldn't want to watch these two idiots discuss politics, eh?

To be fair, this was at least not a completely unreasonable course of action for the pair--Jan and Damon were independently wealthy even before her father's ludicrous funds were considered. They could reasonably do what they wanted with their lives. The problem of course is Muir assumes they have insights worth communicating, and that they would be successful at this. Indeed, the course of this... well, it's not a storyline, so let's call it a plot element... makes it clear that not only does Muir have no idea what a good podcast should look like, he has no idea how one would function. Over the next few years, it will generally act as some sort of very low maintenance news station, alternating with "he said/she said" debates done  with Muir's usual insight, which as one can guess, wasn't much. The podcast began with the name 'Trainwreck', suggested by Sam, but quickly switched to the name 'Black and White', which was obviously about as ridiculous and poorly considered. The running theme of it all, right from the start, was that this was how news should be done and was another sign that the MSM was in real trouble, man! 

That what the pair were producing here was turgid and witless, something with all the drama and depth of watching paint dry was quietly ignored. As usual, because Muir was writing this, everyone treated this damn thing like it was an online heavyweight. And El Dorado Dad was on hand to hand the pair plentiful Plot Coupons, as we will see in the future.

Now, this is the first of what would become a fairly standard recurring element of DbD, some of the cast are doing some news thing. In many ways it is the model of them all and possibly the most successful--Muir kept it running for years and unlike many later takes, it has an ending or something close to it. In those later takes on the idea, Muir would simply get bored (for reasons we'll get into as we cover this iteration, because the problem is inherit to it) and just stop writing about it. But the most obvious effect of this is that by starting to split his cast into two semi-distinct groupings Muir began the process that would sideline Jan and Damon, turning them from main characters into background details. Not least of all because where Muir thinks he's giving them a distinct job, he's saddling them with a function that Sam and Zed do just as well. Which would be demonstrated almost immediately when Zed bumped into Muir's favored presidential candidate Fred Thompson. In Home Depot.

Like I keep saying, let it wash over you.

Completely Composed Of Hitler Particles!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Lightning Express.

...

I mean, at this point, he's not only gone 'mask off' about this stuff, he's practically starting to tear off his own face.

Healthy Parenting.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Jade Box.

...

I have to admit, this is one of the less creepy "Zed is a possessive Dad" bits.

Which is still so fucking creepy.

Just A Few, Simple Reasonable Demands.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Tarzan the Tiger.

One is torn between disgust at the naked misogyny, racism and Islamophobia of all this, and amusement at the pathetically unearned confidence that backs it all. Muir seems to think he and his are so utterly vital to the world, and have such incredible leverage, even as it all comes tumbling down.

Aiming For Profundity, Hitting Word Salad.

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

This really underlines that Muir wants to be seen as sulking in his tent like the mighty Achilles without the accomplishments and raw ability to make people care about that. But then, he just thinks he magically has those as an average white guy.

He Asks Who Is The Worse Enemy, The Hebrew Or The Saracen?

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Pirate of Panama.

Jesus, he's barely trying to pretend that the ((())) aren't there when he yells about 'globalists'. All to lead into his old Islamophobia and oh yes, just a dose of sexism. Because Muir won't admit that his entire "philosophy" has left him a bitter, isolated old coot screaming that any of the human race that isn't as fearful and hateful as him is his enemy. And also, even if they pass that part, they still have to get by the envelope test.

They're Getting Some Of The Evil They Wanted, So They'll Forgive The Evil They Didn't Want.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because A Final Reckoning.

You can always count on Muir to remind you that his politics are just vile and wretched, and that he will gleefully assume that bigotry has to be making good things happen, it has to, because otherwise, he'd have to admit he's spent his life making the world and the country he claims to love worse.

Take THAT, Mitch!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Diamond Master.

There's something darkly amusing that all the service McConnell did for the Right still sees him hated and loathed by them.

The Transition Era; Part 4: A New More Constant Version Of The Sitcom From Hell. Now With More Politics!

 And so now on to that other half of the Owens' equation. Which to be fair is closer to 3/4s. While Zed spends his time earning his dough at a low-paying job he's somehow not qualified for, Sam takes care of the home life, which includes the twins and having Skye lounging around. Oh, and taking lots of calls from Zed, who needs her help to answer hardware questions. Yes, Zed is constantly on the phone with his wife on his supposed temp job that he will somehow keep for two years.

Just let it flow through you.

Sam sits in an interesting place during the early parts of this period. While she tosses out that she'll be doing some consultant work from home early on, this never gets developed on and to be frank, Muir likely just forgets about it. Sam is presented as mostly a homemaker. As for the twins (named Caroline Kiko Owens and Catherine Mari Owens, both destined to be known by their middle names), they're props. Which is at least forgivable at this point, because, well, babbies. Come back in a few years where things will not have improved. The most worrying thing about the pair at this point was how badly Muir drew them which was very, very badly.

This is another thing he will not improve at.

And then there's Skye, and well, there's something we have to deal with. I largely just nodded in the direction of the issue during the Mystery Business(tm) Era, but now it comes front and center. Sam and Skye clearly actually have a sizable gap of years between them. While Skye's age is left somewhat vague, she is definitely in her early 20s at this point. While this put the age gap at 20 years or higher pre-retcon, even after Sam got aged down, there should be a good decade and a half between them. Speaking for all older siblings with that kind of gap--this changes the relationship dynamics.  You are an adult while this sibling is a child and that changes everything. The relationship is usually more avuncular, sometimes even parental. There is affection--often deep affection--but there is also distance.

Sam and Skye have the dynamics of a pair of siblings who fought over toys. Indeed, sometimes the strip out and out says they did, which.... well, would suggest bad things about Sam's maturity if one were to accept her age as stated. But in truth this is just another indication that the fluidity of Sam's years that settled in over the Late Mystery Business(tm) Period was going to be a permanent feature.

I dwell on this now for a simple reason--Skye and Sam's relationship was moving to a new prominence in this period. The pair frequently found themselves anchoring not just strips but storylines. And so we saw more and more of them butting heads, and, well, they did not have a great dynamic. Muir wrote Skye to be nasty and unpleasant, and she was. But when he wrote Sam responding to this unpleasantness, he wrote what amounted to her standard response--match it then overwhelm it.

Which meant that Muir's "good sister" was written as more unpleasant than his "bad sister", something that would largely continue to be the case for most of the strip's run.

Once again, looking at the overall model Muir was using, his intent here was clear. Early on, Muir frequently looked to sitcoms for models of his setting. The Mystery Business(tm) Era had been intended to be a workplace comedy, but frequently defaulted (most likely more by accident than intention) into the 90s-early Double Aughts urban professional pals comedy, the format Seinfeld had perfected, and Friends had figured out how to homogenize into something a little less savage. But again, neither had really been working for Muir. The workplace comedy as workplace comedy had largely been moribund for most of Mystery Business(tm)'s existence, a thing he only managed to get the occasional strip and a handful of weak brief, inconsequential storylines out of. The urban professional pals material that he seemed to default to out of a lack of direction was vague and even more inconsequential.  It filled panels, but it didn't suggest new storylines. Muir wanted a setup where he could swiftly brainstorm something besides 'cast members sit around and yak at each other.'

And so, to start the next phase of his comic's existence, Muir shifted into the early 90s blue-collar family sitcom, a format he felt would act as creative lubricant. Obviously, these were not his only reasons. Muir's creative processes are often quite clearly a muddle of knee-jerk reactions,wish fulfillment, and artistic shortcuts. As I noted last time, so much of what happens to Zed seems to be about giving his fake self a life he wished he had. But it does seem safe to say that moving Zed and Sam's section of the strip's setting to this was about a genre jump he thought would work. 

I've used the phrase 'Sitcom from Hell' to describe DbD's non-political or less-political strips' usual combo of hackneyed, cliched situational "humor" operating with the cast's deeply unpleasant personalities to producing something that is not only gratingly unfunny but has a sort of unsettling uncanny valley effect. A sitcom written by a deeply unpleasant someone who doesn't understand sitcoms, but thinks they do. The new domestic setting that was being created was not only going to result in a great deal of it, it would start fusing a cloying, cloddish attempt at sentimentality that would somehow make it all worse. 

And just wait until you see what the other half of the Core Four were getting up to.

Muir--Carrying Water For International Far-Rightists He Barely Comprehends.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Scarlet Arrow.

As usual, Muir's take on international politics is a mix of blindly repeating things he hears from other Right-wingers online and whatever bizarre distortions his mind then levies on tales that were distorted to begin with.

So, Muir Apparently Thinks The Yucatan Is Right Next Door To Peru...

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

Always amusing to watch Muir try to dress himself up in education and culture that he doesn't actually comprehend. Well, that or tiresome.

Never Stop With Cheap Shots.

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

Of course, in the real world, Obamacare wound up popular and we're now facing problems because the Repubs keep trying to find ways to cripple it. But fuck it, Muir doesn't have to deal with reality. He can just sit back, insist that every lie he tossed out was true, and that every morally bankrupt failure he's backed worked out. 

Same as it ever was.

Enjoy A Shotgun Blast Of Muir's Warped Family Values!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Tarzan the Mighty.

...

And I'm actively relieved that this one of the more sedate takes on his breast-feeding fetish. That's what years of following this strip has done to me.

Muir Asked Himself, 'How Can I Do This In A Way That's Even More Phoned In?"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Haunted Island.

I'd ask why they aren't facing any of the many charges they could face from all this, but remember they still probably run the county. Something that will likely come back into play the moment Democrats win some national elections again.

So, about a month, I'd say.

I Reiterate, The Shoutouts To Fans Keep Getting Weirder And Weirder...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Whispering Smith Rides.

I'm kind of surprised that it isn't the 1960s Batmobile being trotted out, along with the quote, but then, the original Burton movie is nearly 40 years old now.

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.

Finding An Excuse To Be Bigoted About Everybody Else.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Winking Idol.

...

It's like he's trying to underline my frickin' point. Muir doesn't actually feel anything about the plight of Palestinians. He despises them the same as he always has. It's just that now he can look at the Israeli Right's rhetoric on them and recognize its obvious hatefulness--because he's a nasty antisemite now, so he's always looking for excuses to despise Jews.

He Can Accept This As Wrong As Long As It's Clear White People Are The Real Victims.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Strings of Steel.

Once again, Muir demonstrating that this reconsideration of Israel doesn't come from a place of deep moral revaluation, it comes from him buying narratives that both confirm existing biases and frame this as another slight against whites. Because, once again, he's gotten really, really Nazi these days.

The Transition Era; Part 2: A Periods Piece.

 When I first set forth the idea of eras being divided up into periods, I noted that the Mystery Business(tm) Era's division was very simple and that future eras were likely going to be more involved. And well, not only was I right, but the very next era would prove to be the most Byzantine of the lot. As I noted in the last installment, the Transition Era was one of constant clumsy experimentation, and that wound up giving it the most periods of any era--eight periods, over a six year, eight-month span. Further, there is no uniformity here--some will last for years, others can be measured in weeks. A lot of this is because of the period's lack of narrative sinews--what might come across as a storyline in one of the more defined eras winds up being the closest thing to something holding a large sequence of strips together as a unit.

And so, to give you all an idea of what's ahead, I will list off those periods, with a brief explanation of what each entails. My classification of these periods is largely going to focus on what Zed's doing, both because he's rapidly becoming the principal protagonist and because it provides a handy measuring stick. Trust me, by the later portions of the era, Damon and Jan are already in sharp decline as relevant characters.

1. The Hardware Store Period (2008-9): For the next two years after getting laid off, Zed does the obvious thing, and goes to work as a floorman in a Home Depot. You know, what any guy who has worked in design at a high professional level and is also a highly accomplished military sniper does. With a wife, two daughters and a sister-in-law who frequently refuses to leave back at home. Politically, Muir goes from an endless cycle of denial and fretting over the 2008 Presidential election, and then, well, really losing it about Obama.
2. Opening the Bar Period (2010): Zed decides that he just CAN'T keep working at a hardware store and so the cast decides--hey, why don't they open a bar? You know! As one does! There are shenanigans with evil unions, Naomi comes back, and oh, so much awfulness over a period of months, as Zed prepares for his new business.
3. Cap'n Mitty, US Agent Period (2010-11): But it turns out his country needs him again! Yep, just three years after calling him back to service in Iraq, Zed has to go to Afghanistan. There's Muir's first, real sustained action storyline, we get a new character, and oh, boy is this bad. Prepare for awkward action, bad blocking, cheap sentimentality, cheaper shock, and a guy who talks like Ensign Chekov all the freaking time! 
4. Working the Bar Period (2011-12): With the epic adventure done, the cast settles into what's supposed to be the new normal, but doesn't actually last a year. The Bar is supposed to be a laidback place for the cast to hang out, bump into politicians and mutter about how awful Obama is. But it just sort of hangs around as a limp setting, Mystery Business(tm) only even more poorly defined and with raunchier fanservice. Oh, and Skye dates that new character I mentioned. It's weird.
5. First Trailer Trash Period (2012): Hey, remember how Obama is bad? Well it turns out he really is awful! He and his evil gubmint goons force Sam and Zed to abandon their house due to legal problems and move into a trailer. Oh, and they somehow keep the bar running in all this chaos with a government that is actually investigating them.
6. CIA-Paid-For-House Period (2012-13): Hey, remember what just happened? Yeah, forget about it. Zed's secret CIA allies have nullified it, and gotten them the house back using secret government funds which is very cool and not at all illegal. Now just settle in for the election, where the Democratic usurper will.... And... he's still here. Uh huh. Hmmm.
7. Second Trailer Trash Period (2013-14): And now the house is gone again, and this time the bar gets closed. Obama is still president, and so his evil gubmint goons took it again. But hey! Zed, Sam and the kids have moved to a new trailer--that's also designated as an Argentinian embassy thanks to El Dorado Dad! Don't think about that! It is just what has happened! So let's all scowl at the gubmint, kids! Scowl and have weird standoffs and intrigues that don't make sense!
8. Road Trip Move Period (2014): Zed's dad called, and he needs Zed's help keeping the Dusky Hordes off his lawn, that being a massive ranch on the Texan Border. It's located in Brewster County, a fact that obviously go to remain stable and true forever afterwards. Sam and Zed travel there, bitching about the gubmint the whole way, as we slowly transition into the Compound Era.

...

Yeah. Those are the periods. Seems chaotic doesn't it?  Trust me... it's worse than that impression. Each one of these is an increasingly fraught and manic stew of paranoia and weirdness, with contradictory plotlines and bad writing. So buckle in. Once again--hella bumpy ride ahead. But hey, at least it's going to start... fairly sedate.

Making It Clear It's The Wrongs Against Him That Bug Him.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Fighting with Buffalo Bill.

Once again, any relief one might feel to see Muir finally acknowledging the immoral nature of much of Israel's policy, or their flaws as an ally is completely offset by the vicious antisemitism that fuels it and the nasty conspiracy-laden way that it is put. Hell, this one even tries to make it look like the US is the primary victim of Israel's foreign and Palestinian policy, and... no.

The only relief here is that Muir is clearly writing from a somewhat checked-out place, ignoring a domestic scene that is not looking good for his politics.

Looking At Tanks Makes Sam Go Howler Monkey!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Scarlet Streak.

There's something especially grim in that the only reason Muir can finally see this as vicious is that his antisemitism has reached Third Reich levels himself. In the old days, he was nodding along with shit like that, and muttering "Ahh, but we must support Israel..."

"The Tsar Has Those Of The Tainted Blood Around Him!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Perils of the Wild.

...

I see Muir is already picking his scapegoat in the Administration, and gosh, it's the Jewish son-in-law. It's astonishing how much of an out-and-out Nazi he's become, while imagining himself to be something that isn't.

"Now Hurry Up! I've Got To Speak To The Degenerate Gender Studies Class At JMS In An Hour!"

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

As usual in these cases, several days of feeling angry at the Administration have shifted to Muir finding a way to transfer his anger to his imaginary cabal of leftists. Because otherwise, Muir might have to admit he was wrong about something.

But hey, he's back to trying to make Teeter happen.

Remember When They Ruled Over This County With An Iron Grip?

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Ace of Spades.

As we watch Muir's characters express their fury about having any obligations to anybody and their indignation that there are law enforcement bodies that don't just shoot brown people and leftist scum, a reminder that just two years ago, this place was insisting it was a separatist republic under the rule of this family.

As Usual, Muir Turns Against Oppression When He Thinks It Might Be Turned On Him, Personally.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Wolves of the North.

The fascinating thing about Muir's "uniparty" bullshit is that you get scenarios like this. When the people he supports do something that annoys him, he just rewrites reality so it isn't actually his side doing things--things that he supported in their initial phases, mind you--no, no it's that evil conspiracy that runs thing in the shadows doing it. Muir may be a fascist, but he's largely ruled by the impulses that created the Italian Regency of Carnaro, the unrecognized interwar microstate where the militias that had taken over wound up doing things like having mock battles with live grenades, because, hey why not, they're full of vital energy after all. He loves oppression in the abstract and when he thinks it's happening to his enemies, but eventually, he runs headlong into the fact that his dreamed of dictatorship is going to have build a general state capacity for oppression that could be used against him. And whenever that happens, he grows irate, because he is fundamentally a child demanding his vague and contradictory wishes be granted instantaneously and with no negative consequences for himself.

These moments are always true 'stopped clock' scenarios, Muir reaching the right conclusion for once, but based on premises that are completely self-indulgent and hypocritical. And now that I've said all that, let's enjoy Day 2 of Muir on the war path against the Administration, even if he's clearly loading his attitude with qualifiers.

Reality Remains The Champion.

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

And apparently, Muir finally reached the limit of being able to ignore rising gas prices and beef prices, and is throwing a snit. 

Of course, as usual, he still demonstrates a profound ignorance of economic realities even when he bows to the world that actually is--Muir seems to think that importing Argentinian beef would raise the price here instead of lowering it. 

Because he's a dull nativist who assumes that international trade has to be a bad thing.

The Transition Era; Part 1: What The Hell IS The Transition Era?

 As we start the second era of Day by Day, we hit an interesting phenomena... the Transition Era is, at first glance, a tough one to define, something that is most easily delineated by absence. Oh, we can track its dates easy, 2008 until late August 2014, but that's just because of how clearly defined the two eras it's between are. You can tell what the Mystery Business(tm) Era is. It has its nominal office setting as a common thread, even if it was clumsily handled, and clearly something Muir was moving on from by the end. It is easy to see where it starts--the cast after all, more or less introduces itself as a bunch of employees in the opening strips--and where it ends--the incredibly swift off-panel bankruptcy and shuttering of the business, and the cast's fairly nonchalant response to it over the next week.

Likewise, the beginning of the Compound Era that is to follow is easy to spot--Zed and Sam reach his father Wade's ranch, and boom, we have the strip's new basic setting for the foreseeable future. If spotting where it ends is tough, it's only because of just how successful it was at becoming the strip's new baseline, with the Gunpowder County Era being more a natural building upon its predecessor, instead of a radical change. You are in the Compound Era because Zed and Sam are now living on a freaking armed compound. It's genuinely self-demonstrating, not tautological.

Stuck between these two clearly defined eras, the Transition Era can't help but seem like a muddle at first glance, something defined simply by not being either of them. And this impression can only grow greater due to the fact that the Transition Era IS a muddle, a series of ungainly plotlines, incidents and settings all inexpertly welded together in ways that usually do not make sense. Storylines stumble over each other. Elements are introduced, undone, and then reintroduced. It is six years and a period of months of Muir trying to figure out what he wants to do with the strip, constantly changing his mind, becoming fixed on ideas, then abandoning them, either slowly or all at once.

But that's the thing. That muddled effort to find out... that winds up producing a unified story, even if it's on a meta-level. Because the story of the Transition Era is Muir realizing that Sam and Zed are THE central characters of the strip and gradually producing an ideal setting (or what he imagines is an ideal setting) for the new versions of them to play around in. It is not a pretty process. It is a work of fits and starts, and it goes down many strange directions. Further, the end result isn't a success by any decent artistic standard. In fact, it's a grotesque failure. But where it winds up scratches Muir's itch, and we know that, because the strip that comes out the other end is the one that he's pretty much been writing for the past decade. 

And that is so important, because it is what has made this strip something fascinating, something one can follow. If Muir was pure partisan hack tossing out dull Right-wing talking points dully, this strip would be the equivalent of Mallard Fillmore, and I would have probably stopped blogging it, as, well, Duck and Cover, the blog that inspired me to start this one eventually did with the actual Mallard Fillmore. But instead, it is the idiosyncratic work we're looking at, and well, this era is going to be the one where we watch it become that. So sit back, and prepare for surprises, including quite a few times where you'll go, "Wait, he was already doing that?".

It's going to be one hella bumpy ride. I mean that. Once we slide past the very early parts of the opening period where Muir was clearly imagining that yeah, he was going to be back in the funny pages any day NOW, it gets weird. Then it gets weirder. Then it gets bugfuck insane. Also, this is the Era where the fanservice shifts by degrees and fits and starts to softcore. And in many ways, that's the quiet ick of this time period, compared to the loud ick of Muir regularly going to Bad Places. Like I said--hella bumpy.

So Much Disgusting, Bigoted, Imaginary Winning.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Iron Man.

You know, there's just one fascinating bit to that disgusting, pathetic childish bit of idiocy, Muir's most grotesque visit yet to the 'Pork is Muslim kryptonite' well. This is the first strip in the sequence not to be a completely muddled mess. It's repulsive, yes, but it has a beginning, a middle and an end that build off each other.  Comic-Trump and Comic-Mamdani may bear only the slightest of resemblance to the actual individuals they're based on, but at least they don't seem to be changing course mid-talk.

Of course, the problem is it is part of that sequence, which turns it into yet another bizarre swerve, as not only does this confirm that yes, Mamdani was in there, and thus, did hear all that, but Trump once again pivots wildly from his attitude in the previous strip.

But hey, he made that dirty paynim smell his fart, so yay, I guess.

The Imaginary Victories Are Getting Damn Hard To Parse.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fighting Ranger.

...

The most amusing part is that Muir thinks this comes off as such a big win, but Mamdani has been listening to Trump spew anti-Muslim bullshit this entire time like a deranged racist grandpa at Thanksgiving. Or he would have if there was any actual continuity in this entire sequence of strips, but again, Trump and Schumer are having problems staying consistent in their personalities and goals throughout. And I don't mean between strips. I don't even mean between panels. I mean between lines.

Muir Clearly Doesn't Realize That Trump Is A Total Broadway Fan.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fast Express.

You know, moving past the vicious, incoherent anti-Muslim rhetoric, and you have a classic bit for DbD, where Muir is trying to write the fictional versions of politicians in his head as if they were real, except he has multiple versions of them and he can't keep them straight. And so not only do Today-Trump and Today-Schumer contradict how they were acting yesterday, they even change behaviors mid-conversation in this strip.

"And Then HE WOULD CRY!"

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

And here is Muir at his most pathetic, ignoring the blatant efforts to subvert the Constitution the man he's presently following, shrieking that reforms to correct institutions that he and his have thoroughly corrupted and turned into threats are betraying the government and writing a sad little cartoon where the target subjected to this imbecilic harangue just quivers and gives up, for who can resist this transcendent truth?

Again, simply pathetic.

War And Sexism! It's What Made The Country Great!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Social Buccaneer.

He treats this as such a stirring lesson and statement of values, instead of yet another display of his crudity, his racism, and of course, his tendency to try and use static panels as an artistic crutch.

And You Know This Misogyny Is Right, Because An Imaginary Woman Is Saying It!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Phantom Fortune.

The fascinating thing is that Muir is doing this to make us care about this couple. 

And he has succeeded. In that I now want something horrible to happen to them so they don't breed. They are that fucking awful.

An Uncanny Valley Thing From The Images To The Dialogue.

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

The endless cries about the sad victimization of white men are hitting new levels of pathetic.

Also Mari's become the latest Owens girl to sprout the throat-arm. Yay.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 25: The Influence On What Followed.

It's safe to say that the Mystery Business(tm) Era has a strange relation to the later eras of the strip. It's the debut, after all, which introduced the core cast--or at least the original core cast of four. But, except for Damon, that cast barely resembles those early versions of themselves, a bunch of strange substitutes who bear the same name but little more. The simple shallow cores of the characters may remain, but everything around them is completely transformed. Sam is (again, after the unaltered Damon) the closest to her original character, but even that is often a rough similarity. Modern Sam is a vicious unpleasant bitch--to an extent that puts her original self to shame--who goes on about engineering every now and then to establish her as smart and logical, and just ignore your lying eyes. But the modern Sam is a proud redneck, a country girl who don't like them cityfolk, in essence a far cry from the urban professional of the Mystery Business(tm) Era. Her age has been quietly lowered over the years (most of the time), a process that started quite prominently at the very end of the era, but has subtly continued since. It's hard to think she and her now husband used to spend strips complaining about how they were a couple of aging forty year-olds who felt increasingly out of place in the modern world, but then as I've noted before, characters in DbD don't develop, they change. Sam now seems to be a nearly ageless vixen, even if she's now a grandmother. Who recently gave Zed yet another child herself.

Zed is an even more extreme change, an entirely new character sitting in the old's remodeled skin. The process of becoming Captain Mitty that began in the later years of the Mystery Business(tm) Era and accelerated in the Transition Era (something we'll be examining heavily in the upcoming segments) has run its course and turned him into a scowling attempt at an action hero. Zed's original schlub status and human touches are gone, replaced by a grim idol of toxic masculinity. And Zed is fortunate compared to Jan, who is now a hollow space where a character was, nodding along with her husband against the values she was created to embody. What little importance she has in the strip comes from the deus ex machinas that are her father and her son, supplying the Compound with infinite Plot Coupons through limitless wealth and infinite magitek respectively.

For that matter, while Damon's character remains the same, the one member of the cast who is still who he was to begin with, well... as I said in the first entry about him... he doesn't show up much anymore. He might still be the same guy but the strip doesn't need that guy anymore. And Muir seems to realize this on some level--every effort to bring him back ends with Damon shuffling off after a few weeks, Jan in tow. It seems that nostalgia is what keeps them around these days, in so much that they're even around.

And that nostalgia is key to understanding the bizarre relationship that the Mystery Business(tm) Era has with the strip's later days. Muir clearly has a sentimental attachment to the early days of the strip, beyond some simple wish to keep some level of continuity. But he can never indulge too much in that sentiment, because the strip that now exists just doesn't match the early one. The DbD that is now is an elaborate, rickety structure built over a ditch, and focusing on the foundations could send the entire structure toppling down below. There's clearly a part of Muir that wants to just abandon it all and move on to a new work--witness the occasional side projects. And yet, both fears of losing his audience and his own attachment to what he's made keeps him still writing the old strip--again, witness the occasional side projects being presented as fictional works created by Sam, featuring protagonists that are supposed to be self-inserts of her. He just can't move on. Aside from his business model, something in him won't let him. And so we get the occasional strange wistful comment on the past, one that ignores most of what actually happened at the time.

This can go in odd places. I've referred to the fate of poor Suzi the Intern on multiple occasions, and now is a good time to detail it. Over a decade after her aborted storyline ended abruptly without even really starting, and she unceremoniously exited the strip, Sam brought her up to her husband during a discussion of the "Me Too" movement. This was a standard misogynistic denial of its legitimacy, during which Sam chuckled that Zed was lucky that "Suzi from a few years ago" didn't make a (spurious) report on him. Now, you may think that depicting the movement as nothing more than hysterical women reporting on men that they'd been obsessed with would be the low point of this. But, no it got worse. Zed wound up giving Suzi what she'd never had in her actual appearances, a last name. Indeed, "Suzi Strom" got a sudden nationality change--she was apparently Swedish, something that had never been indicated at the time. No, Zed stated, Suzi wouldn't be saying anything. She had gone back to Sweden years ago, where he stated she had been "raped to death" by her Muslim boyfriend. He then followed this up with a cruel quip.

Yes, that was how Muir had her die, in a cruel manner that regurgitated racist talking points about Europe, Muslims and interracial dating, and misogynistic talking points about women reporting rape, as well as liberal women daring to not do what reactionary white guys demand they do. Made into an object lesson that insisted not only were left and center-left women bad, but they deserve to have bad things happen to them. That's what the Mystery Business(tm) Era has been for the past decade or so. Something to occasionally mine for counterfeit continuity, fraudulent sentiment and cheap shock. 

And so this era stands, both the starting point, and yet a near complete contradiction of what would follow, save, of course, for its politics. But of course, there's a lot more strip ahead, and in the next era, we're going to see that rickety structure get built. Prepare for wackiness. 

But not fun wackiness. Oh no.

"Just Gotta Purge Those Elitist Upper Class Race Traitors! Nip Things In The Blood--I Mean, Bud!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because In the Days of Daniel Boone.

...

...

...

The most pathetic thing about this vile bullshit is it's clear Muir doesn't actually know what the Frankfurt School is, he just imagines he does.

Remember, If The Leopards Are Eating OTHER People's Faces, It's Fine.

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

Muir's ability to pivot on AI in a way that's both witless AND cruel remains a sight to behold. The unlikely, imagined image of scientists losing their livelihoods to the machines makes him chuckle, for they are infected by the woke and have people who are not white guys doing things. But when he remembers the things are scanning his work, he gets so offended.

The Eternal Bleak Whine Of A Shuttered Mind.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Eagle's Talons.

We've literally listen to this man babble pseudoscience, toss out a popular but in fact spurious quote that is, on closer look, little more than vague hatred, and now he spouts the cheap and pathetic lies of "Affirmative Action/DEI ate muh lunch!"

So, yeah, classic Hivemind member, all swollen ego and dismal intelligence.

A Reminder That Cicero Was A Politician.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Beasts of Paradise.

I know I keep saying this, but I find Muir's efforts to dress up his awfulness with the pretensions of high culture and historical knowledge so tedious. Because in the end, his knowledge is just like the philosophy he's using them to try to support--shallow and false.

Once Again, For Muir, The Only Real Problem Is Insufficient Racism.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Around the World in Eighteen Days.

...

I have said it before, and I will say it again--there is no true loyalty in the movement. There was none when it was worshiping Dubya, there was none when it was worshiping any number of Tea Party figures, and there is none when it is worshiping Trump. The idol exists to be exalted, yes, but also to exalt the cult by proxy. When they begin to doubt, they flirt with tearing it down. Muir has had these flirtations before. He's always turned back because Trump has always provided some cruelty, some pretext and some promise of Muir's vaguely imagined racist tomorrow. But the day's fast approaching when Il Puce will simply be an old, done man.

And as that happens, the flirtation will likely move to a true dismissal, and Muir will find a new one.

And it will be worse. That's another thing I'm sure of.

And Dinosaurs Again!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because With Stanley in Africa.

...

Once you move past the typical Muir whining, it's pretty clear he just wants to draw dinosaurs again. There's just so little happening in this strip right now.

"What If We Added More Misogyny To The Robot Jokes?"

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

...

He is so checked out right now. Just look at this. There is nothing to really talk about because this strip is just... nothing.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 24: The Right-Wing Blogger Rainbow Connection.

Muir's long time tradition of what I like to call shoutouts to his internet homies began from the very start of the strip. Of course, where he now does things like drawing avatars of paying fans visiting the cast, back then, he was generally referring to (or in a few rare cases drawing) online Right-wing bloggers, many of them being supporters of his strip. Muir loved this group, valorizing them as 'citizen-journalists' who told it like it was, and struck back at a subversive, incompetent mainstream media that Muir was convinced was biased against the Right. He repeated their triumphs, their stories and their talking points, sometimes word for word, and when something turned against them, well, he looked away.

As was so often the case, Muir was being taken for a ride. On some level, he allowed this to happen--most people are susceptible to being told what they want to hear, and Muir was especially prone, as he demonstrated during this time on numerous subjects and would go on to demonstrate to even greater amounts. Many of his 'citizen-journalists' were astroturfed young Republican party hacks, enjoying the patronage of various Right-wing organisations in the latest wrinkle of an infotainment ecosystem that had developed during the Clinton years. Not all of them, mind you, but enough of them. These were not the, for the most part, humble average citizens doing journalism in their spare time, but actual journalists doing subsidized partisan journalism while insisting they were humble and average.

Of course, the occasional independent figure did enjoy having their signal boosted by the more connected ones. Muir offers a good example of just how this ecosystem could work--a third-rate (and I might be being kind in my ranking there) webcomic artist getting a shot at syndication that he frankly did not deserve, because his comic caught the eye of a bunch of what amounted to low-ranking party functionaries. DbD was even featured and linked on the RNC webpage for a while. Looking at Muir's shoutouts at this stage, it's clear he has a rather sentimental attachment to this world, the exact sort of thing that is meant by 'parasocial bonds'. Muir was imagining a deep spiritual connection with people who were at best friendly acquaintances, at worst, people who viewed him as a cynical means to an end.

As usual with the Mystery Business(tm) Era, this is both a snapshot of an earlier time, and a foreshadowing of what would come. By the end of the Bush years, the Right blogosphere was largely consolidating to a handful of large, carefully curated sites with well-heeled backers. Many of the techniques used to kickstart it would get used again to create the Tea Party movement, and Muir (as we will see in future installments) lapped that one right up too. But in both cases, he wound up a good example of a problem the GOP and the Right weren't counting on, that constantly radicalizing your followers and telling to listen to extremist outsiders doesn't have a clear endpoint, and they will, eventually, wind up listening to actual extremist outsiders instead of the people you've chosen to play the part. When Muir talks about 'citizen journalists' these days, it's usually a crazy person screaming about conspiracy theories that don't help the GOP that much.

But that's the future, something we'll be considering in the next installment.

The Eternal Reoccurrence of Robot Jokes.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Perils of the Yukon.

So now we're combing the 'overly-protective dad' jokes with the robots.

...

This comic is so in the weeds right now.

New And Exciting Areas Of 'Not How It Works'.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because In the Days of Buffalo Bill.

As we witness Muir's utter intellectual pliability once again, I just have to note that Mari is apparently standing nearly stock-still for the last two strips.

"And What About Giants And Dwarfs?"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

It's been kind of fascinating, over the years, watching Muir shift from the classic Rand fan who was personally skeptical of religion to the bizarre hybrid area he exists in now, where he's absolutely still excited about dinosaurs, but also has come to accept that obviously, Goddidit.

Everything Really Is Gender.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Winners of the West.

Muir is tossing this out, a distorted version of the old PC bugaboos, because he heard for years that Trumpism and the MAGAts would lead to failure and humiliation.

And it has, so he's retreating to the sandbox where he can pretend games like this come across as tough, instead of peevish and pathetic.

The Puddle Boasting Of Its Depth.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The White Horseman.

As we stare at this muddled, meaningless attempt at profundity, I'd say it's amazing that Muir wants to go there on the Epstein files, but let's be honest, he's clearly retreated into another one of his incoherent alternate universes on the subject.

Twisting Science And Politics Simultaneously.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Terror Trail.

This is a brand of Muir strip that I've seen before. He pulls this sort of smug both-siding when he sees defeat looming in the distance. Partially to create a reality where, no, no, a loss isn't coming up, the Dems are naturally inferior, they're scum, they can't win, and partially to tell himself that, nah, he's not gonna be the loser, it's the dirty GOP who just won't commit, if they were just more tuff, they'd win. And so he pretends he's not one of the guys attached to the loss, he's part of the vital resurgent new political movement that will soon claim its natural place!

It's more pleasant than admitting he's an old reactionary nitwit who's watching the program he backed collapse into disaster.

Yet again.

And So We Know Misogyny Is Right, For The Imaginary Female Robot Says This Is So.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Secret Four.

The thing that really strikes you is how pathetic all this is, grumbling, whiny, brainless misogyny trying to pretend it is something tough, and thoughtful and deep.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 23: Of Bad Art And Worse Cheesecake.

 I will start with a simple statement. Muir's art, to begin with, was very bad.

And it has somehow managed only to get worse since then. 

So, the breakdown. To start with, Muir's line work is terrible--awkward, choppy and graceless, with the appearance of a rough sketch having been given a very rudimentary clean up digitally. Characters' bodies are generally a sort of blobbish shape. Women are a skinnier blobbish shape with a few other shapes attached, but that's a discussion we'll get into later.  The body is completed with a pair of very noodly arms and either an oval, smoothed rectangle, or oval and triangle attached to serve as a head and face, with a lot of very elementary work done to cover this up. One can argue that this is an almost universal technique, but one is supposed to develop further techniques to mask this and Muir had not. He is bad at hands, producing both lots of people holding mugs, other things and putting them in pockets and other, more dreadful horrors. Eyes are slits or covered with glasses. Women usually have a stereotypical "cupid's bow" to serve as a mouth (especially in closeups), and men usually don't have a mouth, just some sort of beard and mustache combination that serves to fame where the mouth might be. Obviously, as these are drawings, exceptions will exist, but they're usually not improvements, just the odd panel where Zed or Damon flashes a toothy grimace. 

Backgrounds are worse--undeveloped, monochromatic planes most of the time, with the occasional prop thrown in either as filler or for the characters to interact with. Badly. Muir is terrible at perspective, resulting in things like tables that exist simultaneously level with and at angle from the characters, and an overall flat, unreal look. The cast, on the whole, seem to move through a badly abstracted world, one that is barely keeping itself together. It's not unusual to see a standing cast member apparently hefting a laptop around as they use it, the stand-up desk that is implicitly there on examination being left out as an unimportant detail.   And it gets worse.

Muir's fascination with cutting and pasting stock poses as a short cut is already evident. Any perusal of the archive acquaints one with such classics as Zed/Damon pouring coffee, Zed/Damon holding some sort of handheld device awkwardly, Jan/Sam practicing yoga on their desk, and of course, Cast Stands Around. Sometimes a character will be presented in the same pose throughout an entire strip; other times, they be presented in essentially the same pose with subtle differences, but done in a choppy manner so that there is no illusion of motion. 

And indeed, that's another big problem with Muir's art at this stage. He's bad at action, so most of the time, the feel is of looking at a series of still images. And of course, one might say that is what you're doing... but a good comic artist can make your mind fill in the gaps. Muir doesn't do that. There is something truly lifeless in his imagery, and many of his habits and practices make things worse. Further, some of his habits--for example, something that happened multiple occasions, Damon or Zed spending entire strips pouring coffee into a single mug during a conversation--managed to be not merely lifeless, but broke the strip's reality as they did this.

And now we come to another matter--Muir's cheesecake, his attempts to draw female characters for titillation. Note 'attempts'. He's really bad at this. First off, at this stage, his drawings of the female form are like the rest of his artwork, very crude and angular. There's a weird sense of abstraction here that undercuts what Muir's attempting--my joke at the time was 'cubist cheesecake'. 

While this more or less nullifies what Muir's attempting, it doesn't disguise it. Women constantly pose for the imaginary camera, leaning over or back, and arching their legs. Their outfits are generally skimpy--Sam favors flowing dresses, and Jan... Jan's favorite outfit involves a pair of low-rise cargo pants that somehow stay on despite gravity, not infrequently revealing a little whale tail. A corporate executive dressing like That One Intern.

Everything named here is going to get worse in the future. Especially the cheesecake. We will explore why it all somehow got worse in time. But one thing that was arguably holding it back from achieving its later levels of awful was that Muir wasn't trying too hard at this stage. For most of the Mystery Business(tm) Era, it was a largely dialogue-driven office comedy, which wasn't even really attempting much action to begin with. It was a bad office comedy, with bad dialogue, and the art mostly failed at what it was attempting, but oh, God, do we have such deep failures to consider up ahead, as Muir decided he was going to follow his dream and try to be a latter-day Milt Caniff.

You might wonder how such a bad artist got the treatment he did even in the face of Right Wing cultural desperation. As we're going to demonstrate... it was very much a matter of knowing the right people.

A Sullen Bigot Imagines More Sullen Bigots.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Do or Die.

This is what Muir produces when he tries to imagine a master race. Obnoxious, repulsive racists convinced of their own superiority, and easily persuaded that the bloody purge is coming any day now. Kiko fails as a sympathetic character on every level. She's not just a clumsy propaganda piece, she's such a horror that anyone outside the racist bubble wants her to lose.

Knew It Was Coming.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Diamond Queen.

I'm half expecting another one of Muir's "Ha! Made you think I was a Nazi" bits in the near future, where he thinks he's being clever instead of trying to have it both ways. But whether it happens or not, the fact remains that the Nazi apologia I've been seeing as inevitable given the twist of his politics has happened, and it's just as awful and just as brain-dead as I thought it would be.

I mean, he's still tossing out the "Hitler was a socialist" canard, people.

Everything Is Melting, The People, The Scenery, Everything.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Elmo the Fearless.

One thing that makes the endless bitching the cast mutters about how persecuted they are is that they inevitably act like smug jackasses about it in between the bitching.

The Toaster's Been Laughing At Him.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Dragon's Net.

One of the fascinating things about Muir over the years is watching the paranoia grow gradually more all-encompassing. It was always there--even in the early years, he still saw the media as filled with scheming wreckers--but these days, you get the impression there's nowhere he doesn't see the insidious hand of the Conspiracy.

THIS More Or Less Wraps Up, To Have Its Place Taken By THAT.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Vanishing Dagger.

And we segue right from the latest awful robot sex plot back into the latest awful 'Evil Conspiracy of Evil be perving' plot. All of which underlines the extent to which Muir is out of ideas, and his eternal need to bemoan how put upon his cast is.

With their hi-tech robot bodyguards we've just had to endure a ridiculous plotline about. 

Yet More Of THIS!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because King of the Circus.

...

I assume somebody paid to have this be their cameo in the strip. 

...

...

That apparently is what we're looking at here.

...

...

...

The mind boggles.

Still Doing THIS.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Moon Riders.

Well, more proof you can always count on Muir to double down on bad ideas on the vague notion that they'll work if he just keeps at them.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 22: Shuttering Mystery Business(TM)

So, as mentioned, the catastrophic end of Muir's syndication run likely played a significant part in his finally just blowing up one of the foundations of the strip, its office comedy setting. But there were other reasons Muir pulled the trigger on it, one of which he'd actually set in motion towards the start of the year it would end.

Simply put, Mystery Business(tm) had stuck around on a certain level of inertia because it at the very least gave Muir a simple place to bring all his characters together and have them talk. But Sam's motherhood meant--at least in Muir's reactionary universe--that she would have to leave that setting. Now, obviously, Jan and Damon had a close enough relationship to keep in contact with Sam anyway... but that just underlined how redundant Mystery Business(tm) was at this point.

And that was a death sentence, because Muir was transparently tired and unenthusiastic about the office comedy premise at this point. It had consistently failed to launch as a setting. Muir's attempts at office humor storylines were all hackneyed and ill-developed, scuttled not only by his poor sense of humor, but the lack of most of the material that a workplace comedy needs to function. Mystery Business(tm) had failed to produce much in the way of a supporting cast. Aside from the main four, there were two or possibly three such characters produced. All of them boasted only simple first names, one of which was only mentioned in passing, and none of them producing any significant plotline or interaction with the main characters. Suzi, the intern who was into Zed, came the closest, and even she faded after a few strips and once again, only ranked a terrible offscreen death years later. A clear boss character never emerged--Jan was pressed into this service every now and then, but it was never clearly defined, something that only increased the ridiculousness of her situation, a peer when Muir needed her to lose break room arguments, a superior when Muir needed a character to come in and yammer about deadlines. Ultimately, Mystery Business(tm) had never worked as a setting, and that was its doom when Muir got tired of it. 

It's ironic to note that for all their manifest insanity, the Compound, its later attachment Gunpowder County, with environs, and even the strange, shadowy, shifting world of the Transition Era inspired more characters almost immediately, even if some are robots and others have vanished into the ether. (Who remembers Suzy Q? Show of hands, people.) Fundamentally, Muir didn't really want to be Scott Adams, even if he did like Dilbert and see it as a model he could use to make his own strip. No, his heart could never be in it, because what he really wanted was to be Milt Caniff.

And that will lead to our next segment, where we consider the art of the Mystery Business(tm) Era.

With a shudder.

Oh, Boy. THIS Again.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Flaming Disc.

I've said it before, and I will say it again... I am just in the weeds about the robot sex jokes.

The Evil Conspiracy Of Evil Always Be Pervin'. As Opposed To Our Heroes Who... LOOK OVER THERE!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Elmo the Mighty.

There is something bleakly comic about how the endless accusations of how the cast are being victimized by the perv-elite have gradually risen through the ranks.

That and how Muir doesn't seem to realize the inherent hypocrisy and projection in the charge. Once again, when he imagines a bad guy, he pretty much imagines himself.

Almost A Funny Joke. Almost.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Midnight Man.

I don't know why Skye's gone Howler Monkey over that. Zed reacting with incredible aggression to everyday annoyances is pretty much normal.

They Want To Keep The Imagined Immigrants Out, But Import Their Imagined Values.

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

As Muir declares victory yet again, because in the game in his head, he will not only shift the goalposts in whatever directions he wants, he will change the points system, we await him explaining that gay rights and women's equality are evil lies and another things the masses have wisely abandoned as we enter the new age of chudifcation. 

This present 'the cast just yammers at each other plotline' is so tiresome. It just emphasizes how unpleasant the cast are. They are simply awful and hateful and they think that all this makes them better than other people.

"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.

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.

Muir Whines How He Can't Just Have The Fascist Dictatorship He Wants.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Adventures of Peg O' the Ring.

A reminder that Muir isn't talking about the January 6th thugs, whose release by pardon he saw as just and good, but about the various people that the Trump Regime has had to let go because they arrested them speciously. Because due process is for he and him, except, no, they also want a free out when it finds them guilty of the crimes they inevitably commit.

Muir Once Again Declares Nobody Is Racist Enough For Him.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Under the Crescent.

And we move from pretending that Trump is mostly great to pretending that everybody is plotting against Muir again.

Always fun to see Muir spiraling.

A Desperate Attempt To Will Success Into Existence...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Graft.

This manages to be as pathetic as it is vile, an illustration of just how much Muir has warped himself. He's told himself that being a cowardly bigot is being a brave patriot so long that he doesn't know what bravery and patriotism actually are anymore, and so as he applauds awfulness while he can, as the failures inevitably happen, he winds up muttering pathetic rationalizations to avoid the simple fact that he's awful person putting his trust in worse people, trying to extract joy from misery and failure.

Even Muir Is A Little Astonished How Antisemitic He's Getting.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Broken Coin.

Obviously, at least part of the reason Sam is the one muttering this swill is to give Muir cover. "Oh, no, no, it's not me, Sam, you know, she's feisty, she's a redhead, her ladyparts, they get in a twist sometimes..."

Zed Of The Apes Doesn't Understand Your Politics, Woman.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Black Box.

...

Muir giving into all of his antisemitic impulses, all of them, has certainly been a thing.

Even Muir Has To Admit The Hoped For Purge Probably Isn't Coming.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Trey O' Hearts.

There's something so quietly pathetic in the inner lives of people who essentially pay so Muir can draw them--badly--visiting his redneck Legion of Doom, sucking up to the cast, getting to fire imaginary hi-tech guns, and fantasize about essentially being SS guards at a concentration camp.

Incoherent Misogyny. It's What He Does Now.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Master Key (1914).

It's so tiresome when Muir spins his wheels by having Zed and Sam agreeing about braindead fascist talking points for days on end.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 19: Don't Mess With Naomi. Or Bother Having A Coherent Storyline.

 Naomi first appears as a past military comrade of Zed's, an Israeli military contractor who simply pops up to reaffirm Zed's badass credentials. and join in the general abuse of Jan during this storyline. But then, after a week, Muir decides to use her for some cheap sentimental drama and ALSO decides that she's been hired by Jan's dad to keep an eye on her daughter. (So either the military are just letting an unaffiliated mercenary stroll around because, hey, she's cool, she's from an ally, or they're letting a contractor take a side job from a private citizen, neither of which are great.) While this is yet another display of Muir's growing fascination of using Don Portago as an Instant Plot Coupon Dispenser, the more interesting thing is Naomi herself. Somehow, even though she truthfully doesn't seem too distinguishable from the various other soldiers Muir bespecks this storyline with, she tickles Muir's fancy and just keeps showing up throughout. 

Because, that's the other thing about this story--it's long. While the original plan appears to have had this go on for a month--Muir has Zed toss that time out early on--things just dragged on so that Jan and Zed wound up spending most of 2007 in Iraq. And Muir was no more skilled at crafting storylines then as he is now--the entire sojourn is repetitive, formless, and dull. Jan gets taught the same jingoistic, racist messages over and over, all while the real Iraq burned, and Muir struggles to ignore it alongside the rest of reality.

And through it all, Naomi just... hangs around. It's clear that she'd tickled Muir's fancy somehow, likely by his own twisted counterfeit philosemitism which saw Israelis as admirable because they were so good at dealing with those evil Muslims. She likewise gave a window in what was going to be Zed's ever-expanding badass past, which Muir must have found convenient. Still, a casual reader from this era would probably be shocked to learn this incidental character was going to become a major supporting character and at times a member of the main cast. Indeed, Naomi was a good indicator of the future of DbD, a future that was more bizarre, more insane and more unpleasant than its present.

And that present was quite unpleasant indeed.

They Think Their Murderous Racism Is Funny, Folks.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery.

The closest thing to interesting in this racist swill is what lies beneath it. Muir is repeating various idiotic racist shibboleths wholeheartedly, not even bothering to realize that they're fucking nonsense that are wrong on every level.

Because, as I keep noting, Mr. 'Ise Independent Thinker' is a pliable dullard who will repeat any bit of vile bullshit if it tells him he's a special boy, while thinking this shows how clever he is.

They Must Protect Their Imaginary Wives From This Incredible Imaginary Threat.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Queen of the Jungle.

As we take in this pathetic racist swill, a reminder that the population of the US is nearly 350 million, making Muir's impressive sounding number look... well, small.

Especially when you realize that our mighty Murican is quaking in his boots about women and children.

Apparently, Muir Just Wanted To Draw Some Planes.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Jungle Goddess.

As we look at this lazy little cartoon, let's all savor the fact that these days you don't even have to wait a comic or two for Muir's declaration of how very much Nazis the Democrats are to be ironically undercut by him using Nazi-style rhetoric. 

These days, it usually follows in a panel or two.

Sam Making The Howler Monkey Face In The Corner Sums Things Up Perfectly.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because A Dangerous Adventure.

Somehow, the feigned humility only makes the noxious ego that underlies all this stand out even more.

Also, the bad fanservice hits extra-nightmare fuel here.

Keep Paying So Muir Can Keep Making These Lifeless, Wooden Drawings.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Miracles of the Jungle.

...

There's something amazing in Muir's ability to make something that is supposed to be nothing happening feel like an extra level of nothing, filler that seems astonishingly free of actual content. It's a bad kind of amazing, but it's still amazing.

The Desperate Bungled Attempt At Asserting How Superior He Is.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Purple Riders.

There's something quite amusing about how even as Muir tries to insist how rugged and individualistic he is, it's done with whining, and complaining and bitterly insisting how unfair he's being treated by the evil forces of Leftism, while sucking up to one of his clay-footed idols, and looking to him for ideas on how to think.

So typical of our thin-skinned, brittle-boned aspiring ubermensch.

Continuing 'Strained Analogy Theatre'...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Fighting Fate.

...

The way he keeps acting like this is some sort of awesome accomplishment...

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 18: Captain Mitty Does His Duty, And The Feckless Liberal Learns A Lesson.

Zed's Iraq tour was the first true Captain Mitty storyline, but it must be pointed out that he is largely out of focus for it--an important background detail of the storyline, one who allows the entire thing to happen, but not the main character. No, that is Jan, filling the old propaganda role of the skeptical liberal journalist who comes to realize just how vital this war is, how evil our opponents are, and how dedicated our troops are. 

I noted last time that this was accomplished with a  handwave--Jan's father just fixes it, because he can, that's what he does--but I really should zoom in on how forced all this is. While a weak explanation is made of Jan doing this to support Zed, there's very little explanation of how this does this, precisely, and again, once they're over there, Jan largely winds up doing her own thing and having troops tell her that everything she knows is wrong. It's quite clear from a textual standpoint that Jan is in Iraq because she's the sort of character you need over there, and Muir's explanations of the hows and whys are flimsy. For that matter, Jan's storyline is fairly bland. She meets interchangeable troops who are all happy to be there, and annoyed at the perfidious liberals insisting that they aren't. She sees it demonstrated that the native Iraqis are being treated well by them, and in no danger from them. She discovers that local insurgents are vile scum not worthy of her regard. And she discovers the United States press are nakedly biased and laughably incompetent. In essence, everything that Muir had been stating was the case prior to the storyline is confirmed to be exactly correct during it.

Saying this was a tone-deaf and deluded take doesn't cover it. After all, even Muir seems to regard his Iraq War boosterism with a certain level of embarrassment these days, even if it's with the usual qualifiers and avoidance of any real introspection that you'd expect from him. But remember, Muir was writing this in 2007, the year where the occupation truly unraveled.  Muir wrote of a deluded press misleading the American public about what was a massive success just as that press began to produce stories that showed that things were going worse than all but the most skeptical of critics had imagined.

And so, by itself, the main storyline was just a dull, mendacious propaganda piece that was flimsily constructed and monumentally ill-timed. Even Jan's move rightwards was simply Muir doing what he'd been doing prior. No, the importance here lies largely in two areas. One obviously is Zed's continuing move towards becoming the Captain Mitty he is today, which we do see throughout the tale. But more importantly, Muir was about to add a new character, one who would stick and be a significant part of the Transition Era and the early portions of the Compound Era. The exceptionally odd figure who is... Naomi.