Those Good Ol' Fashioned Family Values...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Blake of Scotland Yard.

Ahh, yes, Muir returning to the old well of 'Let's start up a horny business'. Like the dog to its vomit, et cetera, et cetera.

The Uncanny Valley Of Human Relations.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Radio Detective.

...

I have said it on multiple occasions--Muir has never been that good about having the cast interact with each other, but over the last decade it's gotten downright off-putting, especially the moments like that when he's clearly aiming for warm and happy.

In This Family, They Show How Wholesome They Are By Othering Members Who Don't Conform!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Officer 444.

And the awful joke about the woman who murdered her kids is a relief because it puts an end to the antisemitism.

For now.

Finding An Excuse To Be Bigoted About Everybody Else.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Winking Idol.

...

It's like he's trying to underline my frickin' point. Muir doesn't actually feel anything about the plight of Palestinians. He despises them the same as he always has. It's just that now he can look at the Israeli Right's rhetoric on them and recognize its obvious hatefulness--because he's a nasty antisemite now, so he's always looking for excuses to despise Jews.

He Can Accept This As Wrong As Long As It's Clear White People Are The Real Victims.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Strings of Steel.

Once again, Muir demonstrating that this reconsideration of Israel doesn't come from a place of deep moral revaluation, it comes from him buying narratives that both confirm existing biases and frame this as another slight against whites. Because, once again, he's gotten really, really Nazi these days.

The Transition Era; Part 2: A Periods Piece.

 When I first set forth the idea of eras being divided up into periods, I noted that the Mystery Business(tm) Era's division was very simple and that future eras were likely going to be more involved. And well, not only was I right, but the very next era would prove to be the most Byzantine of the lot. As I noted in the last installment, the Transition Era was one of constant clumsy experimentation, and that wound up giving it the most periods of any era--eight periods, over a six year, eight-month span. Further, there is no uniformity here--some will last for years, others can be measured in weeks. A lot of this is because of the period's lack of narrative sinews--what might come across as a storyline in one of the more defined eras winds up being the closest thing to something holding a large sequence of strips together as a unit.

And so, to give you all an idea of what's ahead, I will list off those periods, with a brief explanation of what each entails. My classification of these periods is largely going to focus on what Zed's doing, both because he's rapidly becoming the principal protagonist and because it provides a handy measuring stick. Trust me, by the later portions of the era, Damon and Jan are already in sharp decline as relevant characters.

1. The Hardware Store Period (2008-9): For the next two years after getting laid off, Zed does the obvious thing, and goes to work as a floorman in a Home Depot. You know, what any guy who has worked in design at a high professional level and is also a highly accomplished military sniper does. With a wife, two daughters and a sister-in-law who frequently refuses to leave back at home. Politically, Muir goes from an endless cycle of denial and fretting over the 2008 Presidential election, and then, well, really losing it about Obama.
2. Opening the Bar Period (2010): Zed decides that he just CAN'T keep working at a hardware store and so the cast decides--hey, why don't they open a bar? You know! As one does! There are shenanigans with evil unions, Naomi comes back, and oh, so much awfulness over a period of months, as Zed prepares for his new business.
3. Cap'n Mitty, US Agent Period (2010-11): But it turns out his country needs him again! Yep, just three years after calling him back to service in Iraq, Zed has to go to Afghanistan. There's Muir's first, real sustained action storyline, we get a new character, and oh, boy is this bad. Prepare for awkward action, bad blocking, cheap sentimentality, cheaper shock, and a guy who talks like Ensign Chekov all the freaking time! 
4. Working the Bar Period (2011-12): With the epic adventure done, the cast settles into what's supposed to be the new normal, but doesn't actually last a year. The Bar is supposed to be a laidback place for the cast to hang out, bump into politicians and mutter about how awful Obama is. But it just sort of hangs around as a limp setting, Mystery Business(tm) only even more poorly defined and with raunchier fanservice. Oh, and Skye dates that new character I mentioned. It's weird.
5. First Trailer Trash Period (2012): Hey, remember how Obama is bad? Well it turns out he really is awful! He and his evil gubmint goons force Sam and Zed to abandon their house due to legal problems and move into a trailer. Oh, and they somehow keep the bar running in all this chaos with a government that is actually investigating them.
6. CIA-Paid-For-House Period (2012-13): Hey, remember what just happened? Yeah, forget about it. Zed's secret CIA allies have nullified it, and gotten them the house back using secret government funds which is very cool and not at all illegal. Now just settle in for the election, where the Democratic usurper will.... And... he's still here. Uh huh. Hmmm.
7. Second Trailer Trash Period (2013-14): And now the house is gone again, and this time the bar gets closed. Obama is still president, and so his evil gubmint goons took it again. But hey! Zed, Sam and the kids have moved to a new trailer--that's also designated as an Argentinian embassy thanks to El Dorado Dad! Don't think about that! It is just what has happened! So let's all scowl at the gubmint, kids! Scowl and have weird standoffs and intrigues that don't make sense!
8. Road Trip Move Period (2014): Zed's dad called, and he needs Zed's help keeping the Dusky Hordes off his lawn, that being a massive ranch on the Texan Border. It's located in Brewster County, a fact that obviously go to remain stable and true forever afterwards. Sam and Zed travel there, bitching about the gubmint the whole way, as we slowly transition into the Compound Era.

...

Yeah. Those are the periods. Seems chaotic doesn't it?  Trust me... it's worse than that impression. Each one of these is an increasingly fraught and manic stew of paranoia and weirdness, with contradictory plotlines and bad writing. So buckle in. Once again--hella bumpy ride ahead. But hey, at least it's going to start... fairly sedate.

Making It Clear It's The Wrongs Against Him That Bug Him.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Fighting with Buffalo Bill.

Once again, any relief one might feel to see Muir finally acknowledging the immoral nature of much of Israel's policy, or their flaws as an ally is completely offset by the vicious antisemitism that fuels it and the nasty conspiracy-laden way that it is put. Hell, this one even tries to make it look like the US is the primary victim of Israel's foreign and Palestinian policy, and... no.

The only relief here is that Muir is clearly writing from a somewhat checked-out place, ignoring a domestic scene that is not looking good for his politics.

Looking At Tanks Makes Sam Go Howler Monkey!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Scarlet Streak.

There's something especially grim in that the only reason Muir can finally see this as vicious is that his antisemitism has reached Third Reich levels himself. In the old days, he was nodding along with shit like that, and muttering "Ahh, but we must support Israel..."

"The Tsar Has Those Of The Tainted Blood Around Him!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Perils of the Wild.

...

I see Muir is already picking his scapegoat in the Administration, and gosh, it's the Jewish son-in-law. It's astonishing how much of an out-and-out Nazi he's become, while imagining himself to be something that isn't.

"Now Hurry Up! I've Got To Speak To The Degenerate Gender Studies Class At JMS In An Hour!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Great Circus Mystery.

As usual in these cases, several days of feeling angry at the Administration have shifted to Muir finding a way to transfer his anger to his imaginary cabal of leftists. Because otherwise, Muir might have to admit he was wrong about something.

But hey, he's back to trying to make Teeter happen.

Remember When They Ruled Over This County With An Iron Grip?

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Ace of Spades.

As we watch Muir's characters express their fury about having any obligations to anybody and their indignation that there are law enforcement bodies that don't just shoot brown people and leftist scum, a reminder that just two years ago, this place was insisting it was a separatist republic under the rule of this family.

As Usual, Muir Turns Against Oppression When He Thinks It Might Be Turned On Him, Personally.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Wolves of the North.

The fascinating thing about Muir's "uniparty" bullshit is that you get scenarios like this. When the people he supports do something that annoys him, he just rewrites reality so it isn't actually his side doing things--things that he supported in their initial phases, mind you--no, no it's that evil conspiracy that runs thing in the shadows doing it. Muir may be a fascist, but he's largely ruled by the impulses that created the Italian Regency of Carnaro, the unrecognized interwar microstate where the militias that had taken over wound up doing things like having mock battles with live grenades, because, hey why not, they're full of vital energy after all. He loves oppression in the abstract and when he thinks it's happening to his enemies, but eventually, he runs headlong into the fact that his dreamed of dictatorship is going to have build a general state capacity for oppression that could be used against him. And whenever that happens, he grows irate, because he is fundamentally a child demanding his vague and contradictory wishes be granted instantaneously and with no negative consequences for himself.

These moments are always true 'stopped clock' scenarios, Muir reaching the right conclusion for once, but based on premises that are completely self-indulgent and hypocritical. And now that I've said all that, let's enjoy Day 2 of Muir on the war path against the Administration, even if he's clearly loading his attitude with qualifiers.

Reality Remains The Champion.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Riddle Rider.

And apparently, Muir finally reached the limit of being able to ignore rising gas prices and beef prices, and is throwing a snit. 

Of course, as usual, he still demonstrates a profound ignorance of economic realities even when he bows to the world that actually is--Muir seems to think that importing Argentinian beef would raise the price here instead of lowering it. 

Because he's a dull nativist who assumes that international trade has to be a bad thing.

The Transition Era; Part 1: What The Hell IS The Transition Era?

 As we start the second era of Day by Day, we hit an interesting phenomena... the Transition Era is, at first glance, a tough one to define, something that is most easily delineated by absence. Oh, we can track its dates easy, 2008 until late August 2014, but that's just because of how clearly defined the two eras it's between are. You can tell what the Mystery Business(tm) Era is. It has its nominal office setting as a common thread, even if it was clumsily handled, and clearly something Muir was moving on from by the end. It is easy to see where it starts--the cast after all, more or less introduces itself as a bunch of employees in the opening strips--and where it ends--the incredibly swift off-panel bankruptcy and shuttering of the business, and the cast's fairly nonchalant response to it over the next week.

Likewise, the beginning of the Compound Era that is to follow is easy to spot--Zed and Sam reach his father Wade's ranch, and boom, we have the strip's new basic setting for the foreseeable future. If spotting where it ends is tough, it's only because of just how successful it was at becoming the strip's new baseline, with the Gunpowder County Era being more a natural building upon its predecessor, instead of a radical change. You are in the Compound Era because Zed and Sam are now living on a freaking armed compound. It's genuinely self-demonstrating, not tautological.

Stuck between these two clearly defined eras, the Transition Era can't help but seem like a muddle at first glance, something defined simply by not being either of them. And this impression can only grow greater due to the fact that the Transition Era IS a muddle, a series of ungainly plotlines, incidents and settings all inexpertly welded together in ways that usually do not make sense. Storylines stumble over each other. Elements are introduced, undone, and then reintroduced. It is six years and a period of months of Muir trying to figure out what he wants to do with the strip, constantly changing his mind, becoming fixed on ideas, then abandoning them, either slowly or all at once.

But that's the thing. That muddled effort to find out... that winds up producing a unified story, even if it's on a meta-level. Because the story of the Transition Era is Muir realizing that Sam and Zed are THE central characters of the strip and gradually producing an ideal setting (or what he imagines is an ideal setting) for the new versions of them to play around in. It is not a pretty process. It is a work of fits and starts, and it goes down many strange directions. Further, the end result isn't a success by any decent artistic standard. In fact, it's a grotesque failure. But where it winds up scratches Muir's itch, and we know that, because the strip that comes out the other end is the one that he's pretty much been writing for the past decade. 

And that is so important, because it is what has made this strip something fascinating, something one can follow. If Muir was pure partisan hack tossing out dull Right-wing talking points dully, this strip would be the equivalent of Mallard Fillmore, and I would have probably stopped blogging it, as, well, Duck and Cover, the blog that inspired me to start this one eventually did with the actual Mallard Fillmore. But instead, it is the idiosyncratic work we're looking at, and well, this era is going to be the one where we watch it become that. So sit back, and prepare for surprises, including quite a few times where you'll go, "Wait, he was already doing that?".

It's going to be one hella bumpy ride. I mean that. Once we slide past the very early parts of the opening period where Muir was clearly imagining that yeah, he was going to be back in the funny pages any day NOW, it gets weird. Then it gets weirder. Then it gets bugfuck insane. Also, this is the Era where the fanservice shifts by degrees and fits and starts to softcore. And in many ways, that's the quiet ick of this time period, compared to the loud ick of Muir regularly going to Bad Places. Like I said--hella bumpy.

So Much Disgusting, Bigoted, Imaginary Winning.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Iron Man.

You know, there's just one fascinating bit to that disgusting, pathetic childish bit of idiocy, Muir's most grotesque visit yet to the 'Pork is Muslim kryptonite' well. This is the first strip in the sequence not to be a completely muddled mess. It's repulsive, yes, but it has a beginning, a middle and an end that build off each other.  Comic-Trump and Comic-Mamdani may bear only the slightest of resemblance to the actual individuals they're based on, but at least they don't seem to be changing course mid-talk.

Of course, the problem is it is part of that sequence, which turns it into yet another bizarre swerve, as not only does this confirm that yes, Mamdani was in there, and thus, did hear all that, but Trump once again pivots wildly from his attitude in the previous strip.

But hey, he made that dirty paynim smell his fart, so yay, I guess.

The Imaginary Victories Are Getting Damn Hard To Parse.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fighting Ranger.

...

The most amusing part is that Muir thinks this comes off as such a big win, but Mamdani has been listening to Trump spew anti-Muslim bullshit this entire time like a deranged racist grandpa at Thanksgiving. Or he would have if there was any actual continuity in this entire sequence of strips, but again, Trump and Schumer are having problems staying consistent in their personalities and goals throughout. And I don't mean between strips. I don't even mean between panels. I mean between lines.

Muir Clearly Doesn't Realize That Trump Is A Total Broadway Fan.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fast Express.

You know, moving past the vicious, incoherent anti-Muslim rhetoric, and you have a classic bit for DbD, where Muir is trying to write the fictional versions of politicians in his head as if they were real, except he has multiple versions of them and he can't keep them straight. And so not only do Today-Trump and Today-Schumer contradict how they were acting yesterday, they even change behaviors mid-conversation in this strip.

"And Then HE WOULD CRY!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Steel Trail.

And here is Muir at his most pathetic, ignoring the blatant efforts to subvert the Constitution the man he's presently following, shrieking that reforms to correct institutions that he and his have thoroughly corrupted and turned into threats are betraying the government and writing a sad little cartoon where the target subjected to this imbecilic harangue just quivers and gives up, for who can resist this transcendent truth?

Again, simply pathetic.

War And Sexism! It's What Made The Country Great!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Social Buccaneer.

He treats this as such a stirring lesson and statement of values, instead of yet another display of his crudity, his racism, and of course, his tendency to try and use static panels as an artistic crutch.

And You Know This Misogyny Is Right, Because An Imaginary Woman Is Saying It!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Phantom Fortune.

The fascinating thing is that Muir is doing this to make us care about this couple. 

And he has succeeded. In that I now want something horrible to happen to them so they don't breed. They are that fucking awful.

An Uncanny Valley Thing From The Images To The Dialogue.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Oregon Trail.

The endless cries about the sad victimization of white men are hitting new levels of pathetic.

Also Mari's become the latest Owens girl to sprout the throat-arm. Yay.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 25: The Influence On What Followed.

It's safe to say that the Mystery Business(tm) Era has a strange relation to the later eras of the strip. It's the debut, after all, which introduced the core cast--or at least the original core cast of four. But, except for Damon, that cast barely resembles those early versions of themselves, a bunch of strange substitutes who bear the same name but little more. The simple shallow cores of the characters may remain, but everything around them is completely transformed. Sam is (again, after the unaltered Damon) the closest to her original character, but even that is often a rough similarity. Modern Sam is a vicious unpleasant bitch--to an extent that puts her original self to shame--who goes on about engineering every now and then to establish her as smart and logical, and just ignore your lying eyes. But the modern Sam is a proud redneck, a country girl who don't like them cityfolk, in essence a far cry from the urban professional of the Mystery Business(tm) Era. Her age has been quietly lowered over the years (most of the time), a process that started quite prominently at the very end of the era, but has subtly continued since. It's hard to think she and her now husband used to spend strips complaining about how they were a couple of aging forty year-olds who felt increasingly out of place in the modern world, but then as I've noted before, characters in DbD don't develop, they change. Sam now seems to be a nearly ageless vixen, even if she's now a grandmother. Who recently gave Zed yet another child herself.

Zed is an even more extreme change, an entirely new character sitting in the old's remodeled skin. The process of becoming Captain Mitty that began in the later years of the Mystery Business(tm) Era and accelerated in the Transition Era (something we'll be examining heavily in the upcoming segments) has run its course and turned him into a scowling attempt at an action hero. Zed's original schlub status and human touches are gone, replaced by a grim idol of toxic masculinity. And Zed is fortunate compared to Jan, who is now a hollow space where a character was, nodding along with her husband against the values she was created to embody. What little importance she has in the strip comes from the deus ex machinas that are her father and her son, supplying the Compound with infinite Plot Coupons through limitless wealth and infinite magitek respectively.

For that matter, while Damon's character remains the same, the one member of the cast who is still who he was to begin with, well... as I said in the first entry about him... he doesn't show up much anymore. He might still be the same guy but the strip doesn't need that guy anymore. And Muir seems to realize this on some level--every effort to bring him back ends with Damon shuffling off after a few weeks, Jan in tow. It seems that nostalgia is what keeps them around these days, in so much that they're even around.

And that nostalgia is key to understanding the bizarre relationship that the Mystery Business(tm) Era has with the strip's later days. Muir clearly has a sentimental attachment to the early days of the strip, beyond some simple wish to keep some level of continuity. But he can never indulge too much in that sentiment, because the strip that now exists just doesn't match the early one. The DbD that is now is an elaborate, rickety structure built over a ditch, and focusing on the foundations could send the entire structure toppling down below. There's clearly a part of Muir that wants to just abandon it all and move on to a new work--witness the occasional side projects. And yet, both fears of losing his audience and his own attachment to what he's made keeps him still writing the old strip--again, witness the occasional side projects being presented as fictional works created by Sam, featuring protagonists that are supposed to be self-inserts of her. He just can't move on. Aside from his business model, something in him won't let him. And so we get the occasional strange wistful comment on the past, one that ignores most of what actually happened at the time.

This can go in odd places. I've referred to the fate of poor Suzi the Intern on multiple occasions, and now is a good time to detail it. Over a decade after her aborted storyline ended abruptly without even really starting, and she unceremoniously exited the strip, Sam brought her up to her husband during a discussion of the "Me Too" movement. This was a standard misogynistic denial of its legitimacy, during which Sam chuckled that Zed was lucky that "Suzi from a few years ago" didn't make a (spurious) report on him. Now, you may think that depicting the movement as nothing more than hysterical women reporting on men that they'd been obsessed with would be the low point of this. But, no it got worse. Zed wound up giving Suzi what she'd never had in her actual appearances, a last name. Indeed, "Suzi Strom" got a sudden nationality change--she was apparently Swedish, something that had never been indicated at the time. No, Zed stated, Suzi wouldn't be saying anything. She had gone back to Sweden years ago, where he stated she had been "raped to death" by her Muslim boyfriend. He then followed this up with a cruel quip.

Yes, that was how Muir had her die, in a cruel manner that regurgitated racist talking points about Europe, Muslims and interracial dating, and misogynistic talking points about women reporting rape, as well as liberal women daring to not do what reactionary white guys demand they do. Made into an object lesson that insisted not only were left and center-left women bad, but they deserve to have bad things happen to them. That's what the Mystery Business(tm) Era has been for the past decade or so. Something to occasionally mine for counterfeit continuity, fraudulent sentiment and cheap shock. 

And so this era stands, both the starting point, and yet a near complete contradiction of what would follow, save, of course, for its politics. But of course, there's a lot more strip ahead, and in the next era, we're going to see that rickety structure get built. Prepare for wackiness. 

But not fun wackiness. Oh no.

"Just Gotta Purge Those Elitist Upper Class Race Traitors! Nip Things In The Blood--I Mean, Bud!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because In the Days of Daniel Boone.

...

...

...

The most pathetic thing about this vile bullshit is it's clear Muir doesn't actually know what the Frankfurt School is, he just imagines he does.

Remember, If The Leopards Are Eating OTHER People's Faces, It's Fine.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Ghost City.

Muir's ability to pivot on AI in a way that's both witless AND cruel remains a sight to behold. The unlikely, imagined image of scientists losing their livelihoods to the machines makes him chuckle, for they are infected by the woke and have people who are not white guys doing things. But when he remembers the things are scanning his work, he gets so offended.

The Eternal Bleak Whine Of A Shuttered Mind.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Eagle's Talons.

We've literally listen to this man babble pseudoscience, toss out a popular but in fact spurious quote that is, on closer look, little more than vague hatred, and now he spouts the cheap and pathetic lies of "Affirmative Action/DEI ate muh lunch!"

So, yeah, classic Hivemind member, all swollen ego and dismal intelligence.

A Reminder That Cicero Was A Politician.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Beasts of Paradise.

I know I keep saying this, but I find Muir's efforts to dress up his awfulness with the pretensions of high culture and historical knowledge so tedious. Because in the end, his knowledge is just like the philosophy he's using them to try to support--shallow and false.

Once Again, For Muir, The Only Real Problem Is Insufficient Racism.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Around the World in Eighteen Days.

...

I have said it before, and I will say it again--there is no true loyalty in the movement. There was none when it was worshiping Dubya, there was none when it was worshiping any number of Tea Party figures, and there is none when it is worshiping Trump. The idol exists to be exalted, yes, but also to exalt the cult by proxy. When they begin to doubt, they flirt with tearing it down. Muir has had these flirtations before. He's always turned back because Trump has always provided some cruelty, some pretext and some promise of Muir's vaguely imagined racist tomorrow. But the day's fast approaching when Il Puce will simply be an old, done man.

And as that happens, the flirtation will likely move to a true dismissal, and Muir will find a new one.

And it will be worse. That's another thing I'm sure of.

And Dinosaurs Again!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because With Stanley in Africa.

...

Once you move past the typical Muir whining, it's pretty clear he just wants to draw dinosaurs again. There's just so little happening in this strip right now.

"What If We Added More Misogyny To The Robot Jokes?"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Radio King.

...

He is so checked out right now. Just look at this. There is nothing to really talk about because this strip is just... nothing.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 24: The Right-Wing Blogger Rainbow Connection.

Muir's long time tradition of what I like to call shoutouts to his internet homies began from the very start of the strip. Of course, where he now does things like drawing avatars of paying fans visiting the cast, back then, he was generally referring to (or in a few rare cases drawing) online Right-wing bloggers, many of them being supporters of his strip. Muir loved this group, valorizing them as 'citizen-journalists' who told it like it was, and struck back at a subversive, incompetent mainstream media that Muir was convinced was biased against the Right. He repeated their triumphs, their stories and their talking points, sometimes word for word, and when something turned against them, well, he looked away.

As was so often the case, Muir was being taken for a ride. On some level, he allowed this to happen--most people are susceptible to being told what they want to hear, and Muir was especially prone, as he demonstrated during this time on numerous subjects and would go on to demonstrate to even greater amounts. Many of his 'citizen-journalists' were astroturfed young Republican party hacks, enjoying the patronage of various Right-wing organisations in the latest wrinkle of an infotainment ecosystem that had developed during the Clinton years. Not all of them, mind you, but enough of them. These were not the, for the most part, humble average citizens doing journalism in their spare time, but actual journalists doing subsidized partisan journalism while insisting they were humble and average.

Of course, the occasional independent figure did enjoy having their signal boosted by the more connected ones. Muir offers a good example of just how this ecosystem could work--a third-rate (and I might be being kind in my ranking there) webcomic artist getting a shot at syndication that he frankly did not deserve, because his comic caught the eye of a bunch of what amounted to low-ranking party functionaries. DbD was even featured and linked on the RNC webpage for a while. Looking at Muir's shoutouts at this stage, it's clear he has a rather sentimental attachment to this world, the exact sort of thing that is meant by 'parasocial bonds'. Muir was imagining a deep spiritual connection with people who were at best friendly acquaintances, at worst, people who viewed him as a cynical means to an end.

As usual with the Mystery Business(tm) Era, this is both a snapshot of an earlier time, and a foreshadowing of what would come. By the end of the Bush years, the Right blogosphere was largely consolidating to a handful of large, carefully curated sites with well-heeled backers. Many of the techniques used to kickstart it would get used again to create the Tea Party movement, and Muir (as we will see in future installments) lapped that one right up too. But in both cases, he wound up a good example of a problem the GOP and the Right weren't counting on, that constantly radicalizing your followers and telling to listen to extremist outsiders doesn't have a clear endpoint, and they will, eventually, wind up listening to actual extremist outsiders instead of the people you've chosen to play the part. When Muir talks about 'citizen journalists' these days, it's usually a crazy person screaming about conspiracy theories that don't help the GOP that much.

But that's the future, something we'll be considering in the next installment.

The Eternal Reoccurrence of Robot Jokes.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Perils of the Yukon.

So now we're combing the 'overly-protective dad' jokes with the robots.

...

This comic is so in the weeds right now.

New And Exciting Areas Of 'Not How It Works'.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because In the Days of Buffalo Bill.

As we witness Muir's utter intellectual pliability once again, I just have to note that Mari is apparently standing nearly stock-still for the last two strips.

"And What About Giants And Dwarfs?"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

It's been kind of fascinating, over the years, watching Muir shift from the classic Rand fan who was personally skeptical of religion to the bizarre hybrid area he exists in now, where he's absolutely still excited about dinosaurs, but also has come to accept that obviously, Goddidit.

Everything Really Is Gender.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Winners of the West.

Muir is tossing this out, a distorted version of the old PC bugaboos, because he heard for years that Trumpism and the MAGAts would lead to failure and humiliation.

And it has, so he's retreating to the sandbox where he can pretend games like this come across as tough, instead of peevish and pathetic.