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.
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