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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fighting Ranger.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because In the Days of Daniel Boone.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Around the World in Eighteen Days.
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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.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because With Stanley in Africa.
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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.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Radio King.
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He is so checked out right now. Just look at this. There is nothing to really talk about because this strip is just... nothing.
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.
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.
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This comic is so in the weeds right now.
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.
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.
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.
