"Just Gotta Purge Those Elitist Upper Class Race Traitors! Nip Things In The Blood!"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because In the Days of Daniel Boone.

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The most pathetic thing about this vile bullshit is it's clear Muir doesn't actually know what the Frankfurt School is, he just imagines he does.

Remember, If The Leopards Are Eating OTHER People's Faces, It's Fine.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Ghost City.

Muir's ability to pivot on AI in a way that's both witless AND cruel remains a sight to behold. The unlikely, imagined image of scientists losing their livelihoods to the machines makes him chuckle, for they are infected by the woke and have people who are not white guys doing things. But when he remembers the things are scanning his work, he gets so offended.

The Eternal Bleak Whine Of A Shuttered Mind.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Eagle's Talons.

We've literally listen to this man babble pseudoscience, toss out a popular but in fact spurious quote that is, on closer look, little more than vague hatred, and now he spouts the cheap and pathetic lies of "Affirmative Action/DEI ate muh lunch!"

So, yeah, classic Hivemind member, all swollen ego and dismal intelligence.

A Reminder That Cicero Was A Politician.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Beasts of Paradise.

I know I keep saying this, but I find Muir's efforts to dress up his awfulness with the pretensions of high culture and historical knowledge so tedious. Because in the end, his knowledge is just like the philosophy he's using them to try to support--shallow and false.

Once Again, For Muir, The Only Real Problem Is Insufficient Racism.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Around the World in Eighteen Days.

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I have said it before, and I will say it again--there is no true loyalty in the movement. There was none when it was worshiping Dubya, there was none when it was worshiping any number of Tea Party figures, and there is none when it is worshiping Trump. The idol exists to be exalted, yes, but also to exalt the cult by proxy. When they begin to doubt, they flirt with tearing it down. Muir has had these flirtations before. He's always turned back because Trump has always provided some cruelty, some pretext and some promise of Muir's vaguely imagined racist tomorrow. But the day's fast approaching when Il Puce will simply be an old, done man.

And as that happens, the flirtation will likely move to a true dismissal, and Muir will find a new one.

And it will be worse. That's another thing I'm sure of.

And Dinosaurs Again!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because With Stanley in Africa.

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Once you move past the typical Muir whining, it's pretty clear he just wants to draw dinosaurs again. There's just so little happening in this strip right now.

"What If We Added More Misogyny To The Robot Jokes?"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Radio King.

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He is so checked out right now. Just look at this. There is nothing to really talk about because this strip is just... nothing.

The Eternal Reoccurrence of Robot Jokes.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Perils of the Yukon.

So now we're combing the 'overly-protective dad' jokes with the robots.

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This comic is so in the weeds right now.

New And Exciting Areas Of 'Not How It Works'.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because In the Days of Buffalo Bill.

As we witness Muir's utter intellectual pliability once again, I just have to note that Mari is apparently standing nearly stock-still for the last two strips.

"And What About Giants And Dwarfs?"

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.

It's been kind of fascinating, over the years, watching Muir shift from the classic Rand fan who was personally skeptical of religion to the bizarre hybrid area he exists in now, where he's absolutely still excited about dinosaurs, but also has come to accept that obviously, Goddidit.

Everything Really Is Gender.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Winners of the West.

Muir is tossing this out, a distorted version of the old PC bugaboos, because he heard for years that Trumpism and the MAGAts would lead to failure and humiliation.

And it has, so he's retreating to the sandbox where he can pretend games like this come across as tough, instead of peevish and pathetic.

The Puddle Boasting Of Its Depth.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The White Horseman.

As we stare at this muddled, meaningless attempt at profundity, I'd say it's amazing that Muir wants to go there on the Epstein files, but let's be honest, he's clearly retreated into another one of his incoherent alternate universes on the subject.

Twisting Science And Politics Simultaneously.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Terror Trail.

This is a brand of Muir strip that I've seen before. He pulls this sort of smug both-siding when he sees defeat looming in the distance. Partially to create a reality where, no, no, a loss isn't coming up, the Dems are naturally inferior, they're scum, they can't win, and partially to tell himself that, nah, he's not gonna be the loser, it's the dirty GOP who just won't commit, if they were just more tuff, they'd win. And so he pretends he's not one of the guys attached to the loss, he's part of the vital resurgent new political movement that will soon claim its natural place!

It's more pleasant than admitting he's an old reactionary nitwit who's watching the program he backed collapse into disaster.

Yet again.

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.

A Sullen Bigot Imagines More Sullen Bigots.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Do or Die.

This is what Muir produces when he tries to imagine a master race. Obnoxious, repulsive racists convinced of their own superiority, and easily persuaded that the bloody purge is coming any day now. Kiko fails as a sympathetic character on every level. She's not just a clumsy propaganda piece, she's such a horror that anyone outside the racist bubble wants her to lose.

Knew It Was Coming.

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

I'm half expecting another one of Muir's "Ha! Made you think I was a Nazi" bits in the near future, where he thinks he's being clever instead of trying to have it both ways. But whether it happens or not, the fact remains that the Nazi apologia I've been seeing as inevitable given the twist of his politics has happened, and it's just as awful and just as brain-dead as I thought it would be.

I mean, he's still tossing out the "Hitler was a socialist" canard, people.

Everything Is Melting, The People, The Scenery, Everything.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Elmo the Fearless.

One thing that makes the endless bitching the cast mutters about how persecuted they are is that they inevitably act like smug jackasses about it in between the bitching.

The Toaster's Been Laughing At Him.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Dragon's Net.

One of the fascinating things about Muir over the years is watching the paranoia grow gradually more all-encompassing. It was always there--even in the early years, he still saw the media as filled with scheming wreckers--but these days, you get the impression there's nowhere he doesn't see the insidious hand of the Conspiracy.

THIS More Or Less Wraps Up, To Have Its Place Taken By THAT.

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

And we segue right from the latest awful robot sex plot back into the latest awful 'Evil Conspiracy of Evil be perving' plot. All of which underlines the extent to which Muir is out of ideas, and his eternal need to bemoan how put upon his cast is.

With their hi-tech robot bodyguards we've just had to endure a ridiculous plotline about. 

Yet More Of THIS!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because King of the Circus.

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I assume somebody paid to have this be their cameo in the strip. 

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That apparently is what we're looking at here.

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The mind boggles.