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. It seems that nostalgia is what keeps him around these days, in so much that he's 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.
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