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.
Since I was only sporadically looking at it then, I had no idea Sam was the elder sister by that much. In fact until just now I’d passively assumed they were twins. Which I blame on Muir’s reliance on templates as much as my ignorance.
ReplyDeleteAssuming we’re roughly in 2009-2010ish, this is the period where Muir should have settled graphically, and stopped trying to “improve” from there. His figures are more solid and better defined than the squiggly noodle people he started out with, but far away from the unholy walking paint blobs they’ve since mutated into. His colors are also easier on the eyes, if completely flavorless.
Muir is, of course, about to have the first domino inside his brain tipped over by the election of Barack Obama, and by 2015 the last one will have fallen and he’ll emerge from the Obama era clinically insane.