The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 4: Essentially, One Character.

 And so now, we reach a look at the cast, and as I have mentioned it is a very small, downright rudimentary one at this point. Over the next few years, the cast will largely remain fixed at four regulars, finally moving up to five for reasons that are actually quite simple (and will be explored later). There will be only a handful of supporting characters introduced, two of whom are parents of the regulars. (They're also some of the only ones to persist.) As I noted previously, Muir's strip has a very threadbare feel, in its earliest stages.

And with those first two characters introduced, we hit a fascinating wrinkle, because those two characters are, as the title of this post indicates, essentially one character. Sam and Zed begin the comic figuratively joined at the hip, and so they stay, frequently becoming literally so in many future strips. Right from the start, the pair's most common use are strips where they bounce the same point of view back at one another. It is downright uncanny.

It's not that Muir doesn't give them what are largely superficial differences. Zed is in 'design', and Sam is an 'engineer'--implicitly a technical engineer. But while Sam liking to fiddle with machines is going to remain a source of gags, in truth, their jobs are barely going to be touched on. Gender is the biggest one, but again, Muir just uses this for shallow, sexist gags and of course, to have Zed and Sam get in a relationship. Perhaps the most significant difference takes its cue from the famous line of As Good As It Gets (which we know Muir watched and knows, because he will reference this very line in a future cartoon)--"I think of a man, then I take away reason and accountability." Sam is Zed with much less of a filter and more of a tendency to fly off the handle, an embodied Id who gets to perform most of the joint character's worst impulses. But again, this isn't as profound a difference as it sounds--it frequently does feel that Sam is 'Zed if he was a woman who just did the things he thinks about doing'.

Now, another aspect of Zed and Sam's role in the strip in the early days is that they are clearly supposed to largely focus on the apolitical side of things, which can come as a surprise to readers used to their present role as embodiments of the proud redneck volk that are the nation's rightful masters. At this point in the strip, they generally focus on slice of life strips, and their time is most often spent complaining about their jobs, and whining about getting old. These are probably the most human characters have been in DbD, and even here one shouldn't overstate things. Muir's strips on these subjects are for the most part cliched, repetitive, and irritating, and often just as sloppily executed as the political strips. But still, at this point, Zed and Sam are meant to be mortals, schlubs, an average Joe, and the somewhat above-average Jill that has taken a shine to the former. That's not going to last.

Oh, is it not going to last.