The Transition Era; Part 2: A Periods Piece.

 When I first set forth the idea of eras being divided up into periods, I noted that the Mystery Business(tm) Era's division was very simple and that future eras were likely going to be more involved. And well, not only was I right, but the very next era would prove to be the most Byzantine of the lot. As I noted in the last installment, the Transition Era was one of constant clumsy experimentation, and that wound up giving it the most periods of any era--eight periods, over a six year, eight-month span. Further, there is no uniformity here--some will last for years, others can be measured in weeks. A lot of this is because of the period's lack of narrative sinews--what might come across as a storyline in one of the more defined eras winds up being the closest thing to something holding a large sequence of strips together as a unit.

And so, to give you all an idea of what's ahead, I will list off those periods, with a brief explanation of what each entails. My classification of these periods is largely going to focus on what Zed's doing, both because he's rapidly becoming the principal protagonist and because it provides a handy measuring stick. Trust me, by the later portions of the era, Damon and Jan are already in sharp decline as relevant characters.

1. The Hardware Store Period (2008-9): For the next two years after getting laid off, Zed does the obvious thing, and goes to work as a floorman in a Home Depot. You know, what any guy who has worked in design at a high professional level and is also a highly accomplished military sniper does. With a wife, two daughters and a sister-in-law who frequently refuses to leave back at home. Politically, Muir goes from an endless cycle of denial and fretting over the 2008 Presidential election, and then, well, really losing it about Obama.
2. Opening the Bar Period (2010): Zed decides that he just CAN'T keep working at a hardware store and so the cast decides--hey, why don't they open a bar? You know! As one does! There are shenanigans with evil unions, Naomi comes back, and oh, so much awfulness over a period of months, as Zed prepares for his new business.
3. Cap'n Mitty, US Agent Period (2010-11): But it turns out his country needs him again! Yep, just three years after calling him back to service in Iraq, Zed has to go to Afghanistan. There's Muir's first, real sustained action storyline, we get a new character, and oh, boy is this bad. Prepare for awkward action, bad blocking, cheap sentimentality, cheaper shock, and a guy who talks like Ensign Chekov all the freaking time! 
4. Working the Bar Period (2011-12): With the epic adventure done, the cast settles into what's supposed to be the new normal, but doesn't actually last a year. The Bar is supposed to be a laidback place for the cast to hang out, bump into politicians and mutter about how awful Obama is. But it just sort of hangs around as a limp setting, Mystery Business(tm) only even more poorly defined and with raunchier fanservice. Oh, and Skye dates that new character I mentioned. It's weird.
5. First Trailer Trash Period (2012): Hey, remember how Obama is bad? Well it turns out he really is awful! He and his evil gubmint goons force Sam and Zed to abandon their house due to legal problems and move into a trailer. Oh, and they somehow keep the bar running in all this chaos with a government that is actually investigating them.
6. CIA-Paid-For-House Period (2012-13): Hey, remember what just happened? Yeah, forget about it. Zed's secret CIA allies have nullified it, and gotten them the house back using secret government funds which is very cool and not at all illegal. Now just settle in for the election, where the Democratic usurper will.... And... he's still here. Uh huh. Hmmm.
7. Second Trailer Trash Period (2013-14): And now the house is gone again, and this time the bar gets closed. Obama is still president, and so his evil gubmint goons took it again. But hey! Zed, Sam and the kids have moved to a new trailer--that's also designated as an Argentinian embassy thanks to El Dorado Dad! Don't think about that! It is just what has happened! So let's all scowl at the gubmint, kids! Scowl and have weird standoffs and intrigues that don't make sense!
8. Road Trip Move Period (2014): Zed's dad called, and he needs Zed's help keeping the Dusky Hordes off his lawn, that being a massive ranch on the Texan Border. It's located in Brewster County, a fact that obviously go to remain stable and true forever afterwards. Sam and Zed travel there, bitching about the gubmint the whole way, as we slowly transition into the Compound Era.

...

Yeah. Those are the periods. Seems chaotic doesn't it?  Trust me... it's worse than that impression. Each one of these is an increasingly fraught and manic stew of paranoia and weirdness, with contradictory plotlines and bad writing. So buckle in. Once again--hella bumpy ride ahead. But hey, at least it's going to start... fairly sedate.

The Transition Era; Part 1: What The Hell IS The Transition Era?

 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.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 25: The Influence On What Followed.

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.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 24: The Right-Wing Blogger Rainbow Connection.

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.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 23: Of Bad Art And Worse Cheesecake.

 I will start with a simple statement. Muir's art, to begin with, was very bad.

And it has somehow managed only to get worse since then. 

So, the breakdown. To start with, Muir's line work is terrible--awkward, choppy and graceless, with the appearance of a rough sketch having been given a very rudimentary clean up digitally. Characters' bodies are generally a sort of blobbish shape. Women are a skinnier blobbish shape with a few other shapes attached, but that's a discussion we'll get into later.  The body is completed with a pair of very noodly arms and either an oval, smoothed rectangle, or oval and triangle attached to serve as a head and face, with a lot of very elementary work done to cover this up. One can argue that this is an almost universal technique, but one is supposed to develop further techniques to mask this and Muir had not. He is bad at hands, producing both lots of people holding mugs, other things and putting them in pockets and other, more dreadful horrors. Eyes are slits or covered with glasses. Women usually have a stereotypical "cupid's bow" to serve as a mouth (especially in closeups), and men usually don't have a mouth, just some sort of beard and mustache combination that serves to fame where the mouth might be. Obviously, as these are drawings, exceptions will exist, but they're usually not improvements, just the odd panel where Zed or Damon flashes a toothy grimace. 

Backgrounds are worse--undeveloped, monochromatic planes most of the time, with the occasional prop thrown in either as filler or for the characters to interact with. Badly. Muir is terrible at perspective, resulting in things like tables that exist simultaneously level with and at angle from the characters, and an overall flat, unreal look. The cast, on the whole, seem to move through a badly abstracted world, one that is barely keeping itself together. It's not unusual to see a standing cast member apparently hefting a laptop around as they use it, the stand-up desk that is implicitly there on examination being left out as an unimportant detail.   And it gets worse.

Muir's fascination with cutting and pasting stock poses as a short cut is already evident. Any perusal of the archive acquaints one with such classics as Zed/Damon pouring coffee, Zed/Damon holding some sort of handheld device awkwardly, Jan/Sam practicing yoga on their desk, and of course, Cast Stands Around. Sometimes a character will be presented in the same pose throughout an entire strip; other times, they be presented in essentially the same pose with subtle differences, but done in a choppy manner so that there is no illusion of motion. 

And indeed, that's another big problem with Muir's art at this stage. He's bad at action, so most of the time, the feel is of looking at a series of still images. And of course, one might say that is what you're doing... but a good comic artist can make your mind fill in the gaps. Muir doesn't do that. There is something truly lifeless in his imagery, and many of his habits and practices make things worse. Further, some of his habits--for example, something that happened multiple occasions, Damon or Zed spending entire strips pouring coffee into a single mug during a conversation--managed to be not merely lifeless, but broke the strip's reality as they did this.

And now we come to another matter--Muir's cheesecake, his attempts to draw female characters for titillation. Note 'attempts'. He's really bad at this. First off, at this stage, his drawings of the female form are like the rest of his artwork, very crude and angular. There's a weird sense of abstraction here that undercuts what Muir's attempting--my joke at the time was 'cubist cheesecake'. 

While this more or less nullifies what Muir's attempting, it doesn't disguise it. Women constantly pose for the imaginary camera, leaning over or back, and arching their legs. Their outfits are generally skimpy--Sam favors flowing dresses, and Jan... Jan's favorite outfit involves a pair of low-rise cargo pants that somehow stay on despite gravity, not infrequently revealing a little whale tail. A corporate executive dressing like That One Intern.

Everything named here is going to get worse in the future. Especially the cheesecake. We will explore why it all somehow got worse in time. But one thing that was arguably holding it back from achieving its later levels of awful was that Muir wasn't trying too hard at this stage. For most of the Mystery Business(tm) Era, it was a largely dialogue-driven office comedy, which wasn't even really attempting much action to begin with. It was a bad office comedy, with bad dialogue, and the art mostly failed at what it was attempting, but oh, God, do we have such deep failures to consider up ahead, as Muir decided he was going to follow his dream and try to be a latter-day Milt Caniff.

You might wonder how such a bad artist got the treatment he did even in the face of Right Wing cultural desperation. As we're going to demonstrate... it was very much a matter of knowing the right people.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 22: Shuttering Mystery Business(TM)

So, as mentioned, the catastrophic end of Muir's syndication run likely played a significant part in his finally just blowing up one of the foundations of the strip, its office comedy setting. But there were other reasons Muir pulled the trigger on it, one of which he'd actually set in motion towards the start of the year it would end.

Simply put, Mystery Business(tm) had stuck around on a certain level of inertia because it at the very least gave Muir a simple place to bring all his characters together and have them talk. But Sam's motherhood meant--at least in Muir's reactionary universe--that she would have to leave that setting. Now, obviously, Jan and Damon had a close enough relationship to keep in contact with Sam anyway... but that just underlined how redundant Mystery Business(tm) was at this point.

And that was a death sentence, because Muir was transparently tired and unenthusiastic about the office comedy premise at this point. It had consistently failed to launch as a setting. Muir's attempts at office humor storylines were all hackneyed and ill-developed, scuttled not only by his poor sense of humor, but the lack of most of the material that a workplace comedy needs to function. Mystery Business(tm) had failed to produce much in the way of a supporting cast. Aside from the main four, there were two or possibly three such characters produced. All of them boasted only simple first names, one of which was only mentioned in passing, and none of them producing any significant plotline or interaction with the main characters. Suzi, the intern who was into Zed, came the closest, and even she faded after a few strips and once again, only ranked a terrible offscreen death years later. A clear boss character never emerged--Jan was pressed into this service every now and then, but it was never clearly defined, something that only increased the ridiculousness of her situation, a peer when Muir needed her to lose break room arguments, a superior when Muir needed a character to come in and yammer about deadlines. Ultimately, Mystery Business(tm) had never worked as a setting, and that was its doom when Muir got tired of it. 

It's ironic to note that for all their manifest insanity, the Compound, its later attachment Gunpowder County, with environs, and even the strange, shadowy, shifting world of the Transition Era inspired more characters almost immediately, even if some are robots and others have vanished into the ether. (Who remembers Suzy Q? Show of hands, people.) Fundamentally, Muir didn't really want to be Scott Adams, even if he did like Dilbert and see it as a model he could use to make his own strip. No, his heart could never be in it, because what he really wanted was to be Milt Caniff.

And that will lead to our next segment, where we consider the art of the Mystery Business(tm) Era.

With a shudder.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 21: Icarus Descends, Or The Brief Period Of Syndication Ends In Failure.

Now, I mentioned that Muir took most of October off. While the exact reason for that isn't clear, it probably had something to do with DbD being pulled from syndication in that very month, and him working to shift to its new, purely online existence. 2007 had earlier seen Muir take a break in February as a result of his trip to Iraq, during which he reprinted older comics. The October break saw no such practice. It was (and is) simply a void in that year's calendar.

So what lead to this sudden fall? Well, obviously, nobody's come forward and given a full account, and I suspect that whoever told Muir it was happening gave him a line of guff, but I don't think it's a coincidence that this came after a strip depicting Hillary Clinton in blackface acquired a great deal of notoriety. (Muir was doing another variation of his "Democrats are the real racists" spiel, incidentally, as well as his usual bashing of Hillary.) That said, I think Muir's ability to produce stupid controversy was the final straw, not the sole cause. The fact was that DbD was an unfunny, badly drawn mess and wasn't catching on--the sympathetic newspaper owners who'd given it a chance were likely finding it an embarrassment even before Muir made it a notorious one. In truth, Muir had been fortunate to get syndicated at all, the recipient of the sort of favoritism he was constantly insisting minorities and women got. As I've noted, the search for a Right-Wing Doonesbury has gifted a lot of hacks chances they didn't deserve. Muir was just one of them.

I'd argue the end of syndication and its psychic effects of Muir almost certainly played a role in the shuttering of Mystery Business(tm). (Though as I plan on noting there were others.) And it also definitely fueled Muir's persecution complex, though this remained in its nascent state in the immediate future. But for broader effect--the strip's brief flirtation with mainstream relevance ended, and honestly, to much of the world, DbD barely left a ripple. It would move to an online space that would simply get crazier and crazier as the years passed.

Ironically, the most lasting effects that syndication wrought on the strip were the earliest, from the changes in Jan and Sam's ethnicity, and perhaps the most visually striking, the move to full Sunday strips. For the first three years and two months of its existence, while DbD had Sunday strips, they were standard single-rowed ones. Early in 2006, one year into syndication, the strip began to have full Sundays, though many of the initial batch are lost--for the first six months, the full Sundays ran for one day on the site only and then were replaced by the opening panels only. (Muir mentioned a plan to bring the full comics back to the site, but never did it.) This was almost assuredly about making sure the strip remained in the comic section on Sundays, instead of getting shuffled to the editorial page. But of course, Muir kept up with it afterwards.

Indeed, it's safe to say the brush with syndication would help annihilate the foundations of the strip as it had been. But then, Mystery Business(tm) had been on shaky ground for awhile, as we're going to see.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 20: Home Again, Muir Retcons Sam Young, And There Are Much Shenanigans.

The Iraq storyline wrapped up in a sluggish fashion over the course of September and October, with Muir repeating the same points he'd made throughout as he brought things to a close.  Things were made more sluggish as Muir wound up taking a sizable break at the start of October, which we will explore in greater depth later. But in November, Zed was back home, reunited with his wife, who had been joined by her mother and had been retconned to be 39.

Sam's mother was... well, much like Jan's father, a stereotypical foreigner speaking slightly broken English leavened with words from her native tongue. (Hence my giving her yet another Superfriends nickname, Samurai Mom.) She would stick around on the margins of the strip for most of the same reasons he did, but that's for another story. Sam's age retcon...

Well, Muir had likely realized that having a 45 year old woman cheerfully going through her first pregnancy as if it were no big deal might not quite work, and so shaved six years off Sam's age. The explanation of why Sam had lied about her age to Zed for so long was strange, convoluted and nonsensical, which is probably why Muir never bothered explaining her future age-downs, just doing them. (We will talk of this again.) Notably, this still left Sam and Skye with about a decade and a half between them, but then, as that whole nonsensical explanation offered in the retcon makes clear, Muir's fictional universe does not bear any examination.

And then, having reunited his cast, Muir had Sam go into labor at the airport, the cast rushed to the hospital, and Sam and Zed finally spawned the twins. It was all very much in what I've come to call the 'Sitcom from Hell' vein, where Muir manages to meld a great deal of hackneyed, obvious humor and situations only done slightly off, and with the deep unpleasantness that is the cast's calling card. As things finally wrapped up and the cast settled in...

They all got the news that Mystery Business(tm) had folded. 

Yep, we're hitting the end of the era, folks.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 19: Don't Mess With Naomi. Or Bother Having A Coherent Storyline.

 Naomi first appears as a past military comrade of Zed's, an Israeli military contractor who simply pops up to reaffirm Zed's badass credentials. and join in the general abuse of Jan during this storyline. But then, after a week, Muir decides to use her for some cheap sentimental drama and ALSO decides that she's been hired by Jan's dad to keep an eye on her daughter. (So either the military are just letting an unaffiliated mercenary stroll around because, hey, she's cool, she's from an ally, or they're letting a contractor take a side job from a private citizen, neither of which are great.) While this is yet another display of Muir's growing fascination of using Don Portago as an Instant Plot Coupon Dispenser, the more interesting thing is Naomi herself. Somehow, even though she truthfully doesn't seem too distinguishable from the various other soldiers Muir bespecks this storyline with, she tickles Muir's fancy and just keeps showing up throughout. 

Because, that's the other thing about this story--it's long. While the original plan appears to have had this go on for a month--Muir has Zed toss that time out early on--things just dragged on so that Jan and Zed wound up spending most of 2007 in Iraq. And Muir was no more skilled at crafting storylines then as he is now--the entire sojourn is repetitive, formless, and dull. Jan gets taught the same jingoistic, racist messages over and over, all while the real Iraq burned, and Muir struggles to ignore it alongside the rest of reality.

And through it all, Naomi just... hangs around. It's clear that she'd tickled Muir's fancy somehow, likely by his own twisted counterfeit philosemitism which saw Israelis as admirable because they were so good at dealing with those evil Muslims. She likewise gave a window in what was going to be Zed's ever-expanding badass past, which Muir must have found convenient. Still, a casual reader from this era would probably be shocked to learn this incidental character was going to become a major supporting character and at times a member of the main cast. Indeed, Naomi was a good indicator of the future of DbD, a future that was more bizarre, more insane and more unpleasant than its present.

And that present was quite unpleasant indeed.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 18: Captain Mitty Does His Duty, And The Feckless Liberal Learns A Lesson.

Zed's Iraq tour was the first true Captain Mitty storyline, but it must be pointed out that he is largely out of focus for it--an important background detail of the storyline, one who allows the entire thing to happen, but not the main character. No, that is Jan, filling the old propaganda role of the skeptical liberal journalist who comes to realize just how vital this war is, how evil our opponents are, and how dedicated our troops are. 

I noted last time that this was accomplished with a  handwave--Jan's father just fixes it, because he can, that's what he does--but I really should zoom in on how forced all this is. While a weak explanation is made of Jan doing this to support Zed, there's very little explanation of how this does this, precisely, and again, once they're over there, Jan largely winds up doing her own thing and having troops tell her that everything she knows is wrong. It's quite clear from a textual standpoint that Jan is in Iraq because she's the sort of character you need over there, and Muir's explanations of the hows and whys are flimsy. For that matter, Jan's storyline is fairly bland. She meets interchangeable troops who are all happy to be there, and annoyed at the perfidious liberals insisting that they aren't. She sees it demonstrated that the native Iraqis are being treated well by them, and in no danger from them. She discovers that local insurgents are vile scum not worthy of her regard. And she discovers the United States press are nakedly biased and laughably incompetent. In essence, everything that Muir had been stating was the case prior to the storyline is confirmed to be exactly correct during it.

Saying this was a tone-deaf and deluded take doesn't cover it. After all, even Muir seems to regard his Iraq War boosterism with a certain level of embarrassment these days, even if it's with the usual qualifiers and avoidance of any real introspection that you'd expect from him. But remember, Muir was writing this in 2007, the year where the occupation truly unraveled.  Muir wrote of a deluded press misleading the American public about what was a massive success just as that press began to produce stories that showed that things were going worse than all but the most skeptical of critics had imagined.

And so, by itself, the main storyline was just a dull, mendacious propaganda piece that was flimsily constructed and monumentally ill-timed. Even Jan's move rightwards was simply Muir doing what he'd been doing prior. No, the importance here lies largely in two areas. One obviously is Zed's continuing move towards becoming the Captain Mitty he is today, which we do see throughout the tale. But more importantly, Muir was about to add a new character, one who would stick and be a significant part of the Transition Era and the early portions of the Compound Era. The exceptionally odd figure who is... Naomi.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 17: Captain Mitty Gets A Wife.

Zed and Sam's relationship had been in sort of a holding pattern since around 2005, when he started treating them as an actual couple, and frankly had been approaching it earlier, as the period of de facto coupleship prior to that wasn't too different. Just now, it was clear that they were dating and sleeping with each other, where previously, you sort of thought they were, but weren't sure. Muir seems to have toyed with shaking the dynamic up when he introduced a young intern named Suzi with a thing for Zed, but this rudimentary storyline died after two strips, and Suzi only ranked a horrible offscreen death years later that was mentioned in passing to allow Muir to indulge even more of his now overwhelming misogyny, racism and Islamophobia. Skye's arrival just added her being, well, awful while keeping the overall relationship the same. So, Muir finally did something that shook things up--he had Sam wind up pregnant just as Zed got called back into service.

Now, Sam previously had shown little interest in or proclivity for motherhood--indeed, she'd even been fairly dismissive of it--but that was the Early Period, where Muir just wanted her and Zed to be a couple of snarky urban professionals. Now that they were ever more Muir's vision of an ideal American couple, well, she and Zed just took it as given that they'd have kids now, which meant marriage. Interestingly, neither of them seemed particularly worried about the fact that Sam was a woman in her forties going through her first pregnancy.

Put a pin in this, there's bullshit coming.

The pair hurried off to Vegas, tied the knot--they had an Elvis wedding--and just like that, there'd been a profound change in the status quo. And Muir having quietly just retconned Sam's entire attitude towards parenthood was, well, going to retcon a lot more in the future. Oh, were changes coming. Indeed, without realizing he'd done it, Muir had just quietly set a charge under what had been the core premise of the strip so far, but that was lurking in the background. 

Soon, Zed would be heading overseas with Jan somehow getting to play journalist because... look, her dad is ultrarich magic, all right? For Sam though, this meant lots of "jokes" playing up her being Zed's loyal, pregnant wife waiting for him to get back as he risked his life.

This isn't particularly subtle propaganda. But then it hardly has been at this point.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 16: Captain Mitty Gets The Call.

 The transformational storyline of the Late Period wouldn't have happened without a Dubya program that I'm going to have to discuss, the embedded journalist program. Throughout the Iraq War, journalists were 'embedded' in various combat units for lengths of time. While supposedly this was about superior access to allow for more in-depth reporting, critics argued it destroyed any pretense of objectivity, encouraging the journalists to identify with the units they were embedded with. Obviously, results varied--the classic Generation Kill, after all, was produced by just such an embedded reporter. And then...

Muir's selection as an 'embedded reporter' came very late in the day for the program, and was undeniably politically motivated. His qualifications were negligible--he was, after all, a syndicated cartoonist whose strip was appearing in a mere four papers. But he did have some connections to the GOP's pet bloggers--we'll discuss this when we wrap up this era--and that's likely most of what got him in. And of course, Muir was motivated. To his mind, the people, manipulated by the lying press, had betrayed the righteous government that had done so much good, and brought the treacherous Democrats back into power. People needed to see the truth, to be brought back into the right way of thinking. And so Muir was off to Iraq.

For five days.

As should be obvious, this wasn't enough time for any sort of in depth "reporting", but it was enough time for a man who was quite interested in producing propaganda to get the material for it, especially if he was simply going to reinforce his priors. (Which, as we will see, is precisely what he did.) And so, Muir came back to produce his story. There were many ways he could have written it.

But it was Muir, so we naturally got his self-insert being recalled to active duty, because he was so badass. It was the sort of choice that a more reasonable person might have realized was a mistake, tone-deaf, insensitive, hell, down right pathetic, but, well, this is Muir. He didn't realize how this might look to someone less... sympathetic. Hell, he was going to give Captain Mitty even more of the life he wished he had.

Zed was going to get married before shipping off, with a family on the way. As I said, the transformational storyline of the Late Period, and oh boy, do we have a lot to talk about in the next installment...

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 15: A New, MORE Inferior Sort Of Leftist.

 By 2006, both the political situation and Muir's strip had changed.  As noted before, Muir had painted the opposition to the Iraq War as a bunch of shiftless, cowardly hippies during the War's buildup--after the quick fall of Saddam's government, he went to ignoring them outright, clearly feeling that the matter was over and he had won. However, the opposition to the War didn't stop and instead broadened, especially as toppling Saddam did not in fact lead to a speedy peace, but instead to a violent insurgency and lengthy occupation. Now, as noted last time, Muir's response to what was actually happening in Iraq was a mixture of studiously ignoring it, and actively gaslighting about it, all while whining about how the press/Democrats/people were misleading the public and being unpatriotic and stuff. But that still left him a more visible, militant Left to deal with than the sort of genteel establishment liberalism represented by Jan. Muir could see the need for another Left character.

And of course, there were other issues with Jan--while she was still allowed moments of her previous feckless idiocy to show what Muir imagined was the liberal viewpoint, her relationship with Damon moved her firmly into one of the good ones, a person Muir imagined was only kept from seeing the transcendent truth by sentimentality, habit, and of course, the evil Leftist conspiracy to lead good young women like her astray. While she hadn't moved completely to her Fox Liberal role yet of showing the audience just how wretched the Democrats were by having this liberal staring agog at their perfidy, she was already making moves in that direction. And of course, both these moves had another source that we'll talk about in the future when we talk about a... certain aspects of the strip, and how it stood at this time. (Let's put a pin in that one, all right?)

Now, the fact was Muir didn't mind this, because he'd clearly had a lot of fun with his vision of the anti-war Left during the buildup, people he enjoyed punching even more than the Democrats. That undifferentiated blob of stupid hippies started showing up again, and then in 2006, a couple were shown praising themselves for booing Hillary Clinton, allowing Muir to bash both her and them simultaneously. A couple strips later, and "Sky" explains that she's going to go visit her in Florida, one of the few clear references to the setting at this point.

And boom. Like that, Sam suddenly had a younger sibling. (That Sam had never mentioned such a sibling previously or the fact that, initially, Sam and her sister had in the vicinity of twenty years between them were just part of the shoddy construction.) Skye--she gained the 'e' on her third appearance--was that mass of dirty hippie peaceniks concentrated into one character. Written to be as obnoxious as possible, she was lazy, perennially unemployed, viciously self-righteous, in essence, every form of sheer awfulness that Muir imagined when he imagined a leftist. She willfully sponges off her sister, a complete parasite. Indeed, Skye isn't going to have any sort of discernible job for years, just floating around and being "left". She's rude, childish, and egotistical. Of course, so is the rest of Muir's cast, but Muir doesn't realize that, he thinks they're quirky and lovable. Another thing that will be come clear very quickly is that Skye's bluntness means she frequently puts her arguments rather forcibly, making the supposedly right-thinking cast look even worse. But again, Muir doesn't notice that. He simply assumes he's built a loser, and that the audience will respond as expected.

And so, his new straw leftist in hand, Muir waits for the Democrats' inevitable defeat in 2006 so he can chuckle about them thinking all this criticism of the glorious war was a good idea.

The Democrats win control of Congress. Muir is irritated, but still convinced that it's all just a temporary disturbance. And that will produce... well, a lot. Oh, such a lot.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 14: Muir Discovers The Party Can In Fact Stop.

 I noted in the past that the tone of the Early Period was largely one of triumphalism, an endless declaration that Muir's ideals were right, his opponents were wrong, and everything was going to go this way forever. While much of this could be chalked up to Muir's own political attitudes, it was also the result of the time it was created in. The Early Mystery Business(tm) Period, after all, did not just begin 2002, but November of 2002, where the combination of the post-9/11 bump, a particularly listless Democratic Party campaign, and just a pinch of gerrymandering had resulted in the Republicans not only gaining the Senate, but increasing their seats in the House, something that seldom happens for the President's party in midterms. This era of partisan triumph floated right over the 2004 elections, where there was another increase of the House majority (albeit with gerrymandering playing an even bigger part) and Bush not only was re-elected, but won a majority of the popular vote. While Muir was overstating things and painting them in his usual hamfisted, delirious manner, this was the brief time when he was roughly in sync with the zeitgeist. Pundits and political analysts talked of a permanent Republican majority. The opposition to the Iraq War, while substantial, was largely treated as an impotent, quixotic movement, and, initially, this helped make it so. And so Muir started 2005, when remember, his strip was truly entering the public eye, in high spirits.

In retrospect, of course, this very appearance of incredible power was deceptive. Bush's popular vote victory was quite narrow, especially for a wartime incumbent. The Republican majority was built on many narrow wins and was far less functional than one would think, as the cynical pragmatists had been gradually starting to get replaced by incompetent true believers, a process that was going to get worse in the years ahead as newer, more delusional strains of fanatics. Corruption was endemic for both brands, simply because the GOP's dominant brand of cynicism breeds crooks and opportunists. And the opposition to many of Bush's policies was stronger than it seemed, while the support was more shallow. 

And of course, there was a simple fact--most of the W. Bush administration's signature policies were bad ideas. Most notably, that war Muir was so very fond of. And as bad ideas are wont to, they went badly. Especially, once again, that war. But all of this was going to take a while to set in. What happened first was the W. Bush administration blowing its political capital on two failed initiatives in a monumental act of hubris, a move to partially privatize Social Security that offended the Left and Center... and a move for an immigrant amnesty that offended the Right. Muir himself would even grumble about that one, though not for very long, as he had other things to worry about. (Though whenever the amnesty proposals popped up during the remainder of Dubya's term, he would grumble once again.) Such as Hurricane Katrina demonstrating just how Dubya's tendency to cut spending and rely on cronyism had gutted necessary programs that had only a decade earlier been considered models.

Simply put, over the next two years, Muir would watch as the forces he'd seen as eternally triumphant crumbled and backslid, as the actions he'd seen as glorious successes turned to grotesque failures, as the national soundtrack turned from 'Have You Forgotten?' by Darryl Worley to 'Holiday' by Green Day. And as that happened, the tone of DbD shifted slightly. Muir became whinier, more defensive. The strip shifted from constant gloating to long stretches of Muir explaining how people were being idiots trusting their lying eyes. Major issues and disappointments were either sidestepped and minimized, like Katrina, or saw Muir actively gaslighting on the matter, such as, well, what was happening in Iraq. Still, Muir was clearly operating from the assumption this was all just temporary disturbances, and that nothing would really change. Which at least partially explains the next character who'd be joining the cast. But this atmosphere was going to hang around for the rest of the Mystery Business (tm) Era, and even into the start of the Transition Era.

Get used to it, and frankly enjoy it while it's here, because what would follow would be worse. 

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 13: Lo, A Captain Mitty Approacheth.

 So now that we've looked at how Jan's character, measly as it had been, was sent into a destructive tailspin by the combination of an ill-considered retcon to her ethnicity, accompanied by the sudden transformation of her background to being ultra-wealthy, and a somehow even more ill-considered relationship with Damon, it's time to move on. Because as significant as all that was, it was small beer next what would wind up the most significant retcon in DbD history, the one which changed Zed and Sam from mere members of an ensemble into the strip's de facto protagonists.

Early in 2005, Zed and Sam went on a date. They were randomly mugged by a knife-wielding thug, as happens in fiction, and most especially conservative fiction, and Zed drew a gun on the mugger, followed, of course, by Sam also drawing a gun. What followed was the stereotypical 'good guy with a gun' story, with Sam and Zed reveling in their mighty power. This moment has been called by others the birth of the new Zed, the figure I like to call 'Captain Mitty'. However, I argue that would actually come later. This was more the moment when the embryonic form of that character, who'd lurked around the edges of Zed in his schlub days, became sharply defined. Captain Mitty would be truly born nearly a year later.

That event would occur in a later mini-storyline, Zed, Sam, Damon and Jan go out to practice their shooting, and Sam notes that the various military guys are saluting Zed. Zed burbles out an explanation, Sam notes that Zed has scars on his back, Zed burbles out more explanation, and in aside panel, two of the military guys reveal that Zed is a former special ops sniper.

And just like that... we had Captain Mitty, Zed not as a dopey aging office worker, but as a patriotic deadly badass. And because she was ultimately defined by her relationship with Zed, Sam would change too, to become the worthy helpmate of this vir maximus. Indeed, we see some of it in that first story I mentioned, where Sam, in that mugging, drew her gun as quickly as Zed did. The woman who'd been defined as Zed's counterpart as a snarky, aging urban professional was going to become, well, his counterpart in a very different way.

Now, this is the start of Zed and Sam's becoming figures of more or less total wish fulfillment, not the end, so we will be talking about this more in the future, especially once we hit the Transition Era. But what we need to shift to in the next installment is how the changing politics of the world changed the tone of DbD in very subtle ways.

At first.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 12: One Of The Worst 'Will-They-Won't-They' Plotlines Ever Depicted Resolves. Terribly.

And so, onto the next part of the Character Assassination of the Liberal Stooge Jan by the Hack Chris Muir. As I've noted previously, the idea that Jan and Damon had this incredible romantic chemistry is something Muir kept tossing out there throughout the Early Period. It wasn't true, but he very much thought it was, hence years of strips where he kept treating Damon's either belittling Jan or acting like a disgusting horndog towards her as some sort of romantic appeal. But with the start of the Late Period, he really stepped it up. Over a series of storylines, starting with the 'Damon quits because Pepsi said mean things about Bush!' one I mentioned in the last installment, Muir gradually hooked up the pair.

The definitive plot where it happened was one where Damon's house got seized and demolished by Florida for eminent domain purposes without any warning--Muir really hates eminent domain--Jan offered to let him stay with her, and, well, that was that. Just as Sam and Zed just sort of were a couple, all at once, Jan and Damon wound up one, and again, that was that.

It's astonishing, really, how little mileage Muir got out of something that he clearly imagined was providing a major plotline. No romantic false leads. No breakups followed by reconciliations. As usual, things just sort of happened, while keeping things almost completely within the tiny little cast he'd provided for the strip. Muir can't write romance for the same reason he can't write anything--there's something in him that just hates having bad things happen to his cast. Damon and Jan wound up another example of what is the typical DbD couple, devoid of any real conflict in their relationship, and with no real chemistry, despite their creator being convinced they possessed oodles of it.

What was worse was what a nasty, dysfunctional dynamic he gave to the pair. Prior to hooking up with Jan, Damon had either been dismissive of her, or had been making passes at her, and afterwards... well, he still was, only now when the second happened, Jan just sort of went along with it. And while she would still fight back against the first, it was generally less and less in the manner of someone who genuinely believed what she was saying and more as someone putting in a token effort. Jan's behavior over this and well, the early stages of the Transition Era, are what caused me to start referring to Muir's cast as 'the hivemind', to symbolize how not only are they all Muir using sock puppets, but for the way that main cast members who are initially shown having distinct opinions are usually warped into just another such puppet in something that feels like it slipped in from a Body Snatchers movie. But Jan's case, well, it's extra unpleasant. Because with her, it has the genuine feel of an abusive relationship, a significant other browbeating and gaslighting their partner until they wind up just echoing their opinions back to them.

In time, Jan's original personality would completely collapse, leaving her without any function in the strip save to show up and agree with Damon. But that would take a while. We would still get many years of watching her and Damon's relationship drag on in that very unpleasant manner I mentioned.

An Announcement.

 So some good news. Now, many years ago, after I'd been writing this blog for half a decade, Muir did a website change that rendered a huge swathe of my links dead--or deadish. They'd take you to the site, but not to any comic. And I mean a lot of strips--I had done not only every strip that had been published during the blog's existence, but every strip published prior. Going through and fixing that would be a monumental task.

Which I have now completed. Nearly all the links work. While there's a possibility of my missing a few, what's more definite is that a few strips have vanished, including a flash-animated strip that Muir apparently lost during the move and has never fixed up.

So, there you go. Won't lie, I'm quite happy to have pulled this off. I should add that I'm still going through my archives and fiddling with things, so the Project isn't finished, but the most substantial part of it is done.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 11: Daddy Warbucks In Rich Corinithian Leather.

 I'd originally planned to talk about Jan and Damon's relationship, but then I saw that the very first storyline to actually ratchet it up involved the emergence of Don Portago's increased role in the strip, so you know what? We're doing this.

Now, Don Portago was introduced primarily to announce that oh, yes Jan was Hispanic, but he did a lot more than that. He also established that she was from a wealthy upbringing. Why Muir decided this was something he had to do isn't necessarily clear--part of it was doubtless to further underline that she was his own stereotype of a liberal, a child of privilege whose views were just the result of being coddled. But it's hard not to suspect that another part was on some level Muir feeling that making Jan Hispanic necessitated giving her more advantages to make her fit that stereotype. Jan as a merely middle-class Hispanic woman doesn't hit the way a Hispanic woman who has never and will never have to worry about money does.

In essence--Muir knew on some level that what he liked to think was bullshit, and if he didn't give Jan more money than she needed, people would naturally start seeing her as facing problems in life. And so her father was made into an insanely wealthy and connected man.

This would have a profound effect on the strip, and in fact, it wouldn't take long for it to emerge. A storyline in 2005 would see Damon quitting in a huff when he found that Mystery Business(tm)'s primary stock holder was Pepsi, whose CEO had said some unkind things about Dubya. Jan, instead of seeing this as a profoundly childish and unprofessional behavior, was filled with admiration, because Muir was convinced he was writing something like Sam and Diane. And so Jan went to her father... who simply bought the company.

Now, this little plot detail was never brought up again, not least of all because Muir just didn't understand what he'd done here. But to mix my Greek metaphors, Pandora's Box was opened, and Muir had discovered the use of a Deus ex machina to have lowered from the heavens at will. El Dorado's Dad improbable wealth would be popping up quite a bit in the future whenever Muir figured he needed it... and that was only the first of these Plot Coupons (as I like to call them) to appear. Soon, they'd proliferate, leading to the bizarre world the cast lives in now.

But then, a lot of very stupid, silly things were put into motion at this stage of the strip.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 10: Muir Diversifies The Cast Through Retcons.

The tiny central cast of DbD of the Early Mystery Business(TM) Period were three white people and one Black guy. Then, very early in the Late Period, this suddenly became one white man, one Black guy, one Hispanic woman, and one Eurasian woman who also would sometimes be treated as fully Asian when that advanced whatever racist point Muir wanted to make in a strip.

And all without changing a single member of the cast.

Muir's decision to simply make it so that Jan and Sam were Hispanic and Eurasian respectively was... well, sloppy as hell, a pair of hamfisted retcons that just... happened. Now, Sam's, which happened quite a bit later, was shockingly quick and thoughtless, occurring in a strip that was insisting Democrats were the real racists, and also featured Damon in blackface. It was likely done partially for the joke, partially so that Muir could say his strip had an Asian in it, and partially so that Sam could fulfill two, count 'em two, sexual fetishes for her creator at once. (Zed even stresses that Sam is Irish-Japanese, which given what we've seen... yeah.)

But Jan's... well, Jan's would be complicated. It is fascinating to stare at Jan as she is presented now--dark-skinned, with long, straight black hair, and compare her to her original form--a very white woman with curly brown hair who almost always wore glasses. While Jan's ultimately dramatic change in appearance would happen, it would take some time. She would look the same throughout the entire Mystery Business(TM) Era. Indeed, only a month or two after the strip where she was revealed to be Hispanic, Jan would be back to acting as a Clueless White Girl in response to another Hispanic, her change ethnicity apparently requiring a little while to... take in universe.

Of course, this revelation had also involved the introduction of a reoccurring supporting cast member who continues to stick around DbD to this day--Jan's father, Don Portago, whom I like to call El Dorado Dad for his tendency to talk like El Dorado in Superfriends, speaking perfect or near-perfect English sprinkled with gratuitous Spanish so we all know he's foreign. El Dorado Dad would, believe it or not, have a significant effect on the strip despite not appearing that often, but that's something to talk about later. For now, what we really need to focus on is how this completely undermined Jan as a character.

Because that is what happened here, something I noted when I first reviewed that strip years ago. Jan wasn't a good character when she was a Clueless Liberal White Girl, but she at least made some sort of sense for the story Muir wanted to tell. Damon is the Black Conservative, Jan is the Clueless Liberal White Girl who keeps telling him he's being Black wrong, in essence, underlining her hypocrisy. Jan says she's fighting against privilege and the status quo but in truth she's mostly just reinforcing it. And that all changes the moment you make her a minority.

Or rather it should. Because of course, Muir hasn't really made Jan Hispanic. Much like Damon, who is completely isolated from the culture of Black America, Jan has no real ties to Hispanic culture. She will start, by degrees, to indulge in a watered down version of the character tics her father uses to show that he's foreign, occasionally speaking in Spanish, but that's it. She has no membership in left or liberal Hispanic groups--Damon will insult those groups to her face, and she will usually say nothing. She makes no comment on the hardships of being Hispanic. The cultural world she lives in is the same white Americana that the rest of the cast does. It is, once again, Muir imagining ethnicity in characters as nothing more than ticking a box.

Now, this would be both a fatal undermining and inept treatment of the character on its own. But of course... Muir would make it worse.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 9: The First Period Shift.

 There are other things to talk about, but as they really cover the entire Mystery Business(TM) Era, we'll keep them for later. For now, it's time to talk about the swift transition from the Early Period to the Late Period. 

Now, the actual division between the two isn't very dramatic. As opposed to some of the Transition Era Periods, which start with a new storyline or plot element flaring up, the change is--within the strip--quiet at first. Damon rings in the New Year gloating about the upcoming death of print media.

Meanwhile, Muir's little strip was beginning its nearly three year run in syndication.

In retrospect, it's quite clear that Muir had always seen DbD as a potential strip for actual publication. He had, in fact, done some work in newspaper comics, producing one of the typical single-panel local Far Side variants of the Nineties and Double-Aughts for a Florida paper. But this wasn't the pathway for anything bigger. Producing the next "Conservative Doonesbury attempt" was. And more importantly, Muir wanted to do this.

Looking at it this way, it's hard not to think that DbD's initial "office comedy" setup was part of making the strip broadly appealing to potential publishers. Aside from this era being something of a peak for the genre in the comics, an office workplace was also a very popular setting for early webcomics, which frequently aimed at being content an office worker could scroll over in their downtime. Muir was likely, in essence, trying to fill the traditional niches.

Now, to be clear I'm not saying the Mystery Business(TM) setting was simply cynical pandering on Muir's part--I've no doubt he imagined he had tons of things to say about office work. (He was of course, simply wrong about this, something we will explore again in time.) But I don't think it was an idea that deeply excited him. It seems pretty clear to me that if he had chosen to set DbD up as the strip he most wanted to write, it would have been very different from the strip he created. Still, from his initial perspective, the plan worked. DbD wound up syndicated. Not widely--it was only in four papers at its peak--but syndicated.

Now, the Late Period would see a lot of dramatic changes within the strip, and many of them seem to have been triggered by multiple factors. Figuring out which ones were most influenced by syndication can be hard. That said, it's very likely that it provided the initial impetus for moving towards a more regular publishing schedule. The Early Period had, as I've noted before, clearly been something of a hobby. Muir took sizable breaks in both 2003 and 2004--indeed, 2004's (caused by family health issues) was an over two-month hiatus that saw him missing the actual Presidential election entirely. That's not something a work trying to be important political commentary does. The Late Period saw him working a more regular schedule, at least until the troubled year of 2007 where it all sort of fell apart. (Again, that's something we'll go into more detail about later.) It would also see the emergence of DbD's Full Sundays, something that would outlast syndication--previously Muir's Sundays were the same size as the weeklies--though that wouldn't happen immediately, and... well, there were some wrinkles that once again, we'll talk about later.

Right after we deal with a bunch of character retcons, and the changing political environment, 'cause oh, boy were things gonna get crazy.