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.
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