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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
