The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 13: Lo, A Captain Mitty Approacheth.

 So now that we've looked at how Jan's character, measly as it had been, was sent into a destructive tailspin by the combination of an ill-considered retcon to her ethnicity, accompanied by the sudden transformation of her background to being ultra-wealthy, and a somehow even more ill-considered relationship with Damon, it's time to move on. Because as significant as all that was, it was small beer next what would wind up the most significant retcon in DbD history, the one which changed Zed and Sam from mere members of an ensemble into the strip's de facto protagonists.

Early in 2005, Zed and Sam went on a date. They were randomly mugged by a knife-wielding thug, as happens in fiction, and most especially conservative fiction, and Zed drew a gun on the mugger, followed, of course, by Sam also drawing a gun. What followed was the stereotypical 'good guy with a gun' story, with Sam and Zed reveling in their mighty power. This moment has been called by others the birth of the new Zed, the figure I like to call 'Captain Mitty'. However, I argue that would actually come later. This was more the moment when the embryonic form of that character, who'd lurked around the edges of Zed in his schlub days, became sharply defined. Captain Mitty would be truly born nearly a year later.

That event would occur in a later mini-storyline, Zed, Sam, Damon and Jan go out to practice their shooting, and Sam notes that the various military guys are saluting Zed. Zed burbles out an explanation, Sam notes that Zed has scars on his back, Zed burbles out more explanation, and in aside panel, two of the military guys reveal that Zed is a former special ops sniper.

And just like that... we had Captain Mitty, Zed not as a dopey aging office worker, but as a patriotic deadly badass. And because she was ultimately defined by her relationship with Zed, Sam would change to, to become the worthy helpmate of this vir maximus. Indeed, we see some of it in that first story I mentioned, where Sam, in that mugging, drew her gun as quickly as Zed did. The woman who'd been defined as Zed's counterpart as a snarky, aging urban professional was going to become, well, his counterpart in a very different way.

Now, this is the start of Zed and Sam's becoming figures of more or less total wish fulfillment, not the end, so we will be talking about this more in the future, especially once we hit the Transition Era. But what we need to shift to in the next installment is how the changing politics of the world changed the tone of DbD in very subtle ways.

At first.