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.
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