"So What Do You Call It?" "The Aristocrats!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Danger Island.

...

The labeling of these strips suggest some fan is paying for this, which only causes me to shake my head in dull wonder.

...So This Is Some Elseworld Or Dream Sequence Then, And Thus Irrelevant. Got It.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Heroes of the Flames.

I find myself reiterating that I remember a time when most of the female cast didn't want to fuck Zed.

A Retcon That Explains Nothing.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Finger Prints.

As I look at this bizarre flashback, I am left baffled where he's going with this, and debating why I should care, as there's an excellent case he'll about-face either immediately or in the near future. There are only two things this strip leaves me sure of--firstly, Muir's as tangled in his constantly altered internal chronology as most casual readers would be. And secondly, he at least partially regrets getting rid of Skye's tattoos when he decided he was going to make her an upstanding citizen.

In His Mind, The Founding Fathers Are Crude Assholes, Just Like Him.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Indians Are Coming!

...As I said yesterday, when you strip out the newer, purer strain of antisemitism Muir's been injecting into the strip, this is very much his usual tactic when he's afraid bad things are coming for he and his. Whining that the GOP is all traitors to whatever the best and proper form of Right Wing is at the moment.

POSTSCRIPT--Muir's expanded on this from where I first saw it, and yet the fascinating thing is how empty all this pseudo-scholarship is, a man shouting bigoted nonsense he has heard third or fourth hand and thinking this proves what an insightful scholar of the human condition he is.

Once Again, I Thought She Was Named After Eva PERON.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Terry of the Times.

Moving on from the deranged antisemitism on display, you know Muir's feeling grim, because he's pulling out the exact 'both sides' script he uses when he feels a loss coming up to try and make himself feel like he was never REALLY affiliated with the people about to eat an L.

It never works. It just makes him even more peevish and desperate.

The Transition Era; Part 5: A New Way To Insist News Media Sucks And Muir Could Do It Better!

 So we move onto Jan and Damon, in what is the last Era where they will be central characters. At the start of the Compound Era, they will have already declined into supporting cast, and by the time we reach the Gunpowder County Era, they will be cameo fodder. And looking at what happens here, it's easy to see what Muir's basic idea was. This was again, essentially, a soft reboot, and he was going to try and return the cast into new versions of their original functions. Sam and Zed were going to go back to being 'slice of life' characters who occasionally did politics, and Jan and Damon were going to serve as DbD's primary political story engine. And that means taking a look at the pair's politics and characters at this point.

Damon is easy. As I said, he is unique among the original Core Four in not changing. But Transition Era Jan exists in a very special space, much like the Era itself. She has not completely shifted into being the liberal who agrees with everything the Right says and thinks her own side are radicals, crooks and wretches. Oh, that is gradually becoming her primary function, but not yet. She will still occasionally spout a bad approximation of a liberal policy or belief so that it may be mocked and attacked. And sometimes she will do something that's a sort of mashup, uttering what Muir imagines is the maximum allowable liberalism a person can have while not being an evil fool. To turn back the clock a bit, at the end of the Iraqi arc, to preserve an illusion of nuance Jan doesn't become an out-and-out supporter of the war.  She declares that she still feels that obviously the US shouldn't be there. But she then states that just as obviously the troops are doing a bang-up job, and they obviously all believe in the cause, and you'd have to be fool to see it differently--in essence, declaring all the propaganda depicted valid. 

As one can see, this is neither a sustainable nor an intellectually honest position for the character, and yes, by the end of the era, Jan will have moved almost completely to her new role of 'Fox News Liberal'. But another aspect is with the combination of this ongoing character reform, which left her in a strange and vague state of flux, and the loss of her job destroying almost all of her non-political character boundaries, Jan wound up emphasizing the closest approximation to a character trait she had left. She began to constantly remind people that she had been in marketing. Constantly. Over the next half-decade, one of Jan's most common character beats was mentioning marketing. It was a fascinating bit where Muir was actually doing something amusing, but not by intent. Everything it seemed had to do with marketing to Jan, in the manner of the famous episode of Car 54, Where are You? where we find everything reminds Officer Gunther Toody of Lower Manhattan at sunset, from the Jersey side.

Of course the other amusing bit is that as Jan had now shifted to the 'Good and Clever' side of the equation, everyone kept insisting now that Jan was just a wiz at marketing. This is structurally funny, firstly because anyone reading the old strips can see the cast's (and Muir's) contempt for what they saw as Jan's unproductive, immaterial role in the firm, an attitude that was being quietly magicked away. But even more amusing was a simple fact--it had been all but stated in the early years of the strip that Jan was bad at her job. It was a big part of her schtick, the wannabe liberal savior who thought she was a master at selling things who wasn't. And now, just as the cast were acting as if they'd always respected her career, they also were pretending she'd always been great at it. Which of course, led to the final bit--Muir clearly has no idea what marketing actually does, so the audience was subjected to Jan using 'marketing' the way that Golden Age comics used 'radiation' as a vague buzzword. 

The other point to remember is that the pair's relationship continued to be a deeply uncomfortable thing throughout this time, with Damon continued to treat his girlfriend--and later wife--with various brands of disrespect. The horndog advances continued. So did the belittling of her views.

So with Transition Era Jan and Damon pretty much laid out, the question then becomes... what does Muir do with these two characters in the new era?

Why, he has them start a podcast of course. Naturally. Who wouldn't want to watch these two idiots discuss politics, eh?

To be fair, this was at least not a completely unreasonable course of action for the pair--Jan and Damon were independently wealthy even before her father's ludicrous funds were considered. They could reasonably do what they wanted with their lives. The problem of course is Muir assumes they have insights worth communicating, and that they would be successful at this. Indeed, the course of this... well, it's not a storyline, so let's call it a plot element... makes it clear that not only does Muir have no idea what a good podcast should look like, he has no idea how one would function. Over the next few years, it will generally act as some sort of very low maintenance news station, alternating with "he said/she said" debates done  with Muir's usual insight, which as one can guess, wasn't much. The podcast began with the name 'Trainwreck', suggested by Sam, but quickly switched to the name 'Black and White', which was obviously about as ridiculous and poorly considered. The running theme of it all, right from the start, was that this was how news should be done and was another sign that the MSM was in real trouble, man! 

That what the pair were producing here was turgid and witless, something with all the drama and depth of watching paint dry was quietly ignored. As usual, because Muir was writing this, everyone treated this damn thing like it was an online heavyweight. And El Dorado Dad was on hand to hand the pair plentiful Plot Coupons, as we will see in the future.

Now, this is the first of what would become a fairly standard recurring element of DbD, some of the cast are doing some news thing. In many ways it is the model of them all and possibly the most successful--Muir kept it running for years and unlike many later takes, it has an ending or something close to it. In those later takes on the idea, Muir would simply get bored (for reasons we'll get into as we cover this iteration, because the problem is inherit to it) and just stop writing about it. But the most obvious effect of this is that by starting to split his cast into two semi-distinct groupings Muir began the process that would sideline Jan and Damon, turning them from main characters into background details. Not least of all because where Muir thinks he's giving them a distinct job, he's saddling them with a function that Sam and Zed do just as well. Which would be demonstrated almost immediately when Zed bumped into Muir's favored presidential candidate Fred Thompson. In Home Depot.

Like I keep saying, let it wash over you.

Completely Composed Of Hitler Particles!

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

...

I mean, at this point, he's not only gone 'mask off' about this stuff, he's practically starting to tear off his own face.

Healthy Parenting.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Jade Box.

...

I have to admit, this is one of the less creepy "Zed is a possessive Dad" bits.

Which is still so fucking creepy.

Just A Few, Simple Reasonable Demands.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Tarzan the Tiger.

One is torn between disgust at the naked misogyny, racism and Islamophobia of all this, and amusement at the pathetically unearned confidence that backs it all. Muir seems to think he and his are so utterly vital to the world, and have such incredible leverage, even as it all comes tumbling down.

Aiming For Profundity, Hitting Word Salad.

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

This really underlines that Muir wants to be seen as sulking in his tent like the mighty Achilles without the accomplishments and raw ability to make people care about that. But then, he just thinks he magically has those as an average white guy.

He Asks Who Is The Worse Enemy, The Hebrew Or The Saracen?

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Pirate of Panama.

Jesus, he's barely trying to pretend that the ((())) aren't there when he yells about 'globalists'. All to lead into his old Islamophobia and oh yes, just a dose of sexism. Because Muir won't admit that his entire "philosophy" has left him a bitter, isolated old coot screaming that any of the human race that isn't as fearful and hateful as him is his enemy. And also, even if they pass that part, they still have to get by the envelope test.

They're Getting Some Of The Evil They Wanted, So They'll Forgive The Evil They Didn't Want.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because A Final Reckoning.

You can always count on Muir to remind you that his politics are just vile and wretched, and that he will gleefully assume that bigotry has to be making good things happen, it has to, because otherwise, he'd have to admit he's spent his life making the world and the country he claims to love worse.

Take THAT, Mitch!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Diamond Master.

There's something darkly amusing that all the service McConnell did for the Right still sees him hated and loathed by them.

The Transition Era; Part 4: A New More Constant Version Of The Sitcom From Hell. Now With More Politics!

 And so now on to that other half of the Owens' equation. Which to be fair is closer to 3/4s. While Zed spends his time earning his dough at a low-paying job he's somehow not qualified for, Sam takes care of the home life, which includes the twins and having Skye lounging around. Oh, and taking lots of calls from Zed, who needs her help to answer hardware questions. Yes, Zed is constantly on the phone with his wife on his supposed temp job that he will somehow keep for two years.

Just let it flow through you.

Sam sits in an interesting place during the early parts of this period. While she tosses out that she'll be doing some consultant work from home early on, this never gets developed on and to be frank, Muir likely just forgets about it. Sam is presented as mostly a homemaker. As for the twins (named Caroline Kiko Owens and Catherine Mari Owens, both destined to be known by their middle names), they're props. Which is at least forgivable at this point, because, well, babbies. Come back in a few years where things will not have improved. The most worrying thing about the pair at this point was how badly Muir drew them which was very, very badly.

This is another thing he will not improve at.

And then there's Skye, and well, there's something we have to deal with. I largely just nodded in the direction of the issue during the Mystery Business(tm) Era, but now it comes front and center. Sam and Skye clearly actually have a sizable gap of years between them. While Skye's age is left somewhat vague, she is definitely in her early 20s at this point. While this put the age gap at 20 years or higher pre-retcon, even after Sam got aged down, there should be a good decade and a half between them. Speaking for all older siblings with that kind of gap--this changes the relationship dynamics.  You are an adult while this sibling is a child and that changes everything. The relationship is usually more avuncular, sometimes even parental. There is affection--often deep affection--but there is also distance.

Sam and Skye have the dynamics of a pair of siblings who fought over toys. Indeed, sometimes the strip out and out says they did, which.... well, would suggest bad things about Sam's maturity if one were to accept her age as stated. But in truth this is just another indication that the fluidity of Sam's years that settled in over the Late Mystery Business(tm) Period was going to be a permanent feature.

I dwell on this now for a simple reason--Skye and Sam's relationship was moving to a new prominence in this period. The pair frequently found themselves anchoring not just strips but storylines. And so we saw more and more of them butting heads, and, well, they did not have a great dynamic. Muir wrote Skye to be nasty and unpleasant, and she was. But when he wrote Sam responding to this unpleasantness, he wrote what amounted to her standard response--match it then overwhelm it.

Which meant that Muir's "good sister" was written as more unpleasant than his "bad sister", something that would largely continue to be the case for most of the strip's run.

Once again, looking at the overall model Muir was using, his intent here was clear. Early on, Muir frequently looked to sitcoms for models of his setting. The Mystery Business(tm) Era had been intended to be a workplace comedy, but frequently defaulted (most likely more by accident than intention) into the 90s-early Double Aughts urban professional pals comedy, the format Seinfeld had perfected, and Friends had figured out how to homogenize into something a little less savage. But again, neither had really been working for Muir. The workplace comedy as workplace comedy had largely been moribund for most of Mystery Business(tm)'s existence, a thing he only managed to get the occasional strip and a handful of weak brief, inconsequential storylines out of. The urban professional pals material that he seemed to default to out of a lack of direction was vague and even more inconsequential.  It filled panels, but it didn't suggest new storylines. Muir wanted a setup where he could swiftly brainstorm something besides 'cast members sit around and yak at each other.'

And so, to start the next phase of his comic's existence, Muir shifted into the early 90s blue-collar family sitcom, a format he felt would act as creative lubricant. Obviously, these were not his only reasons. Muir's creative processes are often quite clearly a muddle of knee-jerk reactions,wish fulfillment, and artistic shortcuts. As I noted last time, so much of what happens to Zed seems to be about giving his fake self a life he wished he had. But it does seem safe to say that moving Zed and Sam's section of the strip's setting to this was about a genre jump he thought would work. 

I've used the phrase 'Sitcom from Hell' to describe DbD's non-political or less-political strips' usual combo of hackneyed, cliched situational "humor" operating with the cast's deeply unpleasant personalities to producing something that is not only gratingly unfunny but has a sort of unsettling uncanny valley effect. A sitcom written by a deeply unpleasant someone who doesn't understand sitcoms, but thinks they do. The new domestic setting that was being created was not only going to result in a great deal of it, it would start fusing a cloying, cloddish attempt at sentimentality that would somehow make it all worse. 

And just wait until you see what the other half of the Core Four were getting up to.

Muir--Carrying Water For International Far-Rightists He Barely Comprehends.

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

As usual, Muir's take on international politics is a mix of blindly repeating things he hears from other Right-wingers online and whatever bizarre distortions his mind then levies on tales that were distorted to begin with.

So, Muir Apparently Thinks The Yucatan Is Right Next Door To Peru...

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

Always amusing to watch Muir try to dress himself up in education and culture that he doesn't actually comprehend. Well, that or tiresome.

Never Stop With Cheap Shots.

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

Of course, in the real world, Obamacare wound up popular and we're now facing problems because the Repubs keep trying to find ways to cripple it. But fuck it, Muir doesn't have to deal with reality. He can just sit back, insist that every lie he tossed out was true, and that every morally bankrupt failure he's backed worked out. 

Same as it ever was.

Enjoy A Shotgun Blast Of Muir's Warped Family Values!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Tarzan the Mighty.

...

And I'm actively relieved that this one of the more sedate takes on his breast-feeding fetish. That's what years of following this strip has done to me.

Muir Asked Himself, 'How Can I Do This In A Way That's Even More Phoned In?"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Haunted Island.

I'd ask why they aren't facing any of the many charges they could face from all this, but remember they still probably run the county. Something that will likely come back into play the moment Democrats win some national elections again.

So, about a month, I'd say.

I Reiterate, The Shoutouts To Fans Keep Getting Weirder And Weirder...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Whispering Smith Rides.

I'm kind of surprised that it isn't the 1960s Batmobile being trotted out, along with the quote, but then, the original Burton movie is nearly 40 years old now.

Nudity/Scanty Clothing Causing Traffic Accidents Is Pretty Much Her Business Model.

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

It's not just that this is a lazy punchline that he's done before. It's that this is the laziest way he's ever done it.

The Transition Era; Part 3: A Place Where We Can Buy Nuts And Screws.

 So to return to our tale of the strip, when we last left Muir he'd gleefully burnt down his old setting, destroying the (admittedly vaguely defined) corporate structure that had provided the base to DbD for five years and a couple months, in no small part because it had proven a cage. Having done this profound act of artistic liberation... he then swiftly erected a new cage, more or less subjecting the strip to a soft reboot.

What has to be understood is that the Muir of 2008 was just not as gloriously unhinged, insanely overconfident and profoundly isolated as he would become. While there was doubtless a part of him that wanted to leap into the action/Right Wing propaganda strip of his dreams, I'd argue two things held him back. Firstly, Muir seems to have felt that at this time that, sure, he'd just watched his time in syndication end in absolute disaster, but he'd be back, sure, so what he should do is make a few changes and wait for the inevitable calls. There were, after all, practical reasons he hadn't led with a potential adventure strip. Secondly, a combination of the familiarity he'd developed with the overall rhythm of the situational gag-a-day setup and likely some worries about whether he was up to writing a genuine action strip kept him in what he imagined was a a safe zone.

It wasn't, he was terrible a gag-a-day writer, so this was more 'his delusions were more small-scale' than 'he saw things clearer then'.

And so, to build things up, over that last week of the Mystery Business(tm) Era, Zed explained to Sam that he was going to have to get a temp job. At Home Depot.

It might strike you that someone who'd been working at design at what appeared to be a high level for a fairly lengthy period of time would actually have pretty good career prospects, and should instead be focusing on getting rehired in his field. It actually did occur to Sam, who brought up, only to have her husband mansplain that companies were skewing younger, making his lengthy background in his chosen profession functionally useless. Which... sure, okay. Fine. It's bullshit, but it's bullshit that at least has some element of logic in it. It scans, even if it doesn't stand up to examination.

The other problem is that Zed is an elite sniper with skills so valuable the government decided his 45 year old ass needed to be in an active combat zone. In the real world--this creates job opportunities. Even if you toss out having him actively serve in combat again (and Muir will not do that, as we have seen and will see) getting a job as an instructor--either in the military or the private sphere--seems like a natural choice. And that's off the top of my head. There are limitless possibilities here.

But no. Zed wasn't going to do that. He was going to work in a Home Depot. A place where, he noted immediately, he had to lie because he knew nothing about hardware. (We will be dealing with the oddity of this phase of Captain Mitty in due time.) To support a household that not only included a wife and twin girls, but also a lazy sister-in-law who frequently just hung around, did no work, and yet somehow it never occurred to them to say 'Get out'. So, yes, brilliant plan. Truly, he is a font of good sense and common wisdom. What an answer. A temp job at Home Depot that he didn't have the credentials or skills for. That would wind up lasting for roughly two years. 

...

This era regularly makes my brain hurt, folks. It manages to be as fundamentally wrong as later eras, but without the same manic energy, and that... just... hurts.

Moving away from the various structural failings of this setup, it's pretty easy to see WHY Muir did this. To start with, he was likely aware, on some level at least, that the Mystery Business(tm) Era had suffered from a certain uniformity of the cast--the Core Four were all a bunch of white collar urban professionals, living and operating in the same sphere. Damon and Jan were clearly in a higher social class than Sam and Zed, even before it was revealed that Jan's father had the wealth of a small (or possibly a medium-sized) nation at his disposal--but not an extraordinarily higher one. (Indeed, it has to be noted that even after the retcon, much as Jan continued to be written as 'white' despite being labeled 'Hispanic', she continued to be written as 'comfortable upper-middle class' despite being labeled as 'multi-billionaire'.) This resulted (even aside from Muir's ideological and artistic limitations) in a flattening of the cast's perspectives--it was all middle class urban professional, all the time. Adding a more blue collar point of view would help correct this. As for why he simply had Zed and Sam suddenly dye their collars instead of introducing new characters, at least part of it was he was still operating from the same lazy script of the Mystery Business(tm) Era. You know, the script he ran when he decided turning Sam and Jan into minorities (but not really) solved the strip's diversity problems.

BUT... there was another reason. An emotional reason that likely any critic would start considering the moment they saw what had happened. Discussing it would almost feel like a cheap shot--except I've followed this strip for over two decades' worth of work, and seen Zed end up at 'defiant country boy rancher/sniper death god', so yeah, it's an unavoidable conclusion. Muir didn't want his author avatar to be a white-collar cubicle-dwelling wage slave anymore. Like many men of his particular generational creche (the Late Boomers/fringe Early Gen X types), Muir clearly felt these professions were alienating from traditional masculinity. It was off-putting enough to be working in advertising, which yes, was Muir's job job in these days. To have his fictional skinsuit doing a variation of the same routine had likely become quietly distressing, another reason to shutter Mystery Business(tm) and move Zed to standing around and asking people if they needed help at a Home Depot, something Muir likely saw as deeply authentic in some manner.

In a very real sense, even as Muir was starting to enjoy being able to alter his fictional universe on a whim, he remained limited in the scope and the ambition of doing so. He was still operating on the same assumptions that had produced El Dorado Dad's ridiculous financial maneuvers, resulting in impossibilities that were absurd, but not fantastic, a la Father Brown's famous dictum involving the impossible meeting between Gladstone and Queen Victoria. The Plot Coupons that Don Portago had produced so far are not surreal and wildly imaginative feats. They are the imaginary self-indulgent actions of an imaginary rich man springing from the mind of an ignorant, arrogant person who worships wealth and has a shallow, smugly cynical of what it can do, and an inability to understand its limitations and the complexity of certain aspects of the real world. So too Zed's new job--Muir assuming that employment would simply work like this. He wanted Zed to be working at a not great paying blue collar job in the manner of an early 90s sitcom, and landed on this. That it made no sense and violated his character's core situation did not matter.

And this was the less painful half of the Owens' household dynamic. What Sam was up to... Well, we'll deal with that in the future.

"Imagine It! Every Student On Their Way To Watch The JMS Fightin' Narcos Seeing The Mayor Get Dissed!"

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

This is Muir's idea of a cutting and witty vengeance, a childish insult in balloon form. Even he seems to notice he's lost the plot here on some level, though I assume he will soon depict this as being SO DEVASTATING to his latest hate object, Mayor Not-Xir.

Again, Charming Family Values.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fire Fighters.

Perfect. Now we're not only getting the standard DbD sleazy business, we're getting nostalgia for DbD sleazy businesses past.