Day by Day opens with the simplest setup imaginable. Indeed, it is so simple, it's barely a setup at all. Characters are shown, introduce each other to one another, and give their job titles. For the first strip, a weak joke about their jobs is given. For the next, we get a weak effort at political humor. That's it.
As I've noted many times, there's a certain threadbare quality to all this. Muir is putting up the minimum effort in his setup, and the result is a fictional universe that feels like it only just started up when we came in. Of course, that's true of the start of any fictional universe, but a good artist can hide the joins so to speak. Muir doesn't even bother. We start with characters all just meeting, even though it's heavily implied they've all worked at this place for awhile. Even worse, Mystery Business(tm) is clearly not a large firm, and Muir's laser focus on the central cast makes it seem even smaller. And so, we get people who clearly should have bumped into each other before now... just bumping into each other, with no real sense of other people who could have served as insulation. We do not get many strips with unseen coworkers being griped about or briefly appearing coworkers to add a sense of scale. Mystery Business(tm) seems initially to consist of just these four characters, and while Muir will briefly gesture at there being other people there, it will never be for very long. Only two coworkers who aren't main staff will be named, and neither will be given much focus. (Though one will rank a nasty off-screen death that will be mentioned years later.)
Now, part of this is there's a sense that DbD at this stage is as much the strip Muir thinks he should be writing at this point in time as it is the strip he wants to write, and these values are going to jostle each other quite a bit in these early years. But there's a fundamental shoddiness that Muir is never going to outgrow.
“ We start with characters all just meeting, even though it's heavily implied they've all worked at this place for awhile.”
ReplyDeleteExcept for Damon. Nobody directly says he’s just started around there, but that was always the impression I got.
The reader has to assume that most of these interactions are taking place in the lounge or breakroom, even when nobody’s standing around pouring coffee (the only concrete visual cue I can recall off the top of my head). Frankly, whatever it is that Mystery Business™ does, it seems like a pretty laid back, sleepy company, because these four seem to spend a pretty big chunk of their working day in there.
On the other hand, it was large enough to have a GYM for its employees, a perk that I’m under the impression is usually the domain of behemoths like Google. (So do these employees get coffee breaks AND gym breaks?)
I’m not smart enough to attempt deducing what Mystery Business™could be by narrowing down what kinds of companies have engineers, designers, and a marketing department.
It would have been interesting if Zed, who was an (industrial?) designer, had ever been shown at his drafting table or using software — you know, actually designing things. But I don’t think he ever was. Nor was Jan ever really SHOWN to be in marketing that I can remember (correct me if she was).
We never see Sam working at her job as an (technical? chemical?) engineer, either. Which really was a wasted opportunity — in the hands of a writer who either knew this territory already or was a good researcher (full disclosure: I am neither), this could potentially have led to some interesting conflicts between her and Zed — beyond the battle-of-the-sexes dance they always did.
As for Damon, I can’t remember his job title ever being specified.
So first things first--you can definitely get the impression that Damon's the new guy from that first strip and a few others, and he does give off the energy of a recent hire. But not consistently, and it isn't in fact SAID he's a new employee. In fact, he's just as likely to come across as an old hand. For that matter, Zed also sometimes comes across as a new hire, and likewise, frequently shifts into somebody who's been around for the firm for awhile. I noted once that the most obvious way to start the strip off would have been to have one of them join Mystery Business(TM) as a new hire and use that as your entryboard to the setting, and it doesn't even seem to have occurred to Muir.
DeleteAnd with that out of the way--yeah, the cast barely seems to do their jobs, and largely hangs out in what appears to be the break room. We do occasionally see them popping into each other's offices, (again, apparently) and in those cases we get little drawings of one of them doing what appears to be work. But this is almost always just window dressing for that strip.
And yeah, Mystery Business(tm) has a gym, which indicates a prosperous firm, and in at least some strips, a Jacuzzi, which indicates the buku bucks. On top of which, in at least one strip, it's sending Zed out literally across the country to do something. So, all these indicators that this is actually a sort of big company... but the damn place seems empty, with just these four bozos... hanging around and yakking in it.
Again, it's all very sloppy and perfunctory, and I'll be talking more about this in the future.