This Continues To Be One Weird Interval.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Jungle Mystery.

See, that's how you get to be an American, in Zed's mind. Waving a gun around and shooting at Blacks.

An Upended Car, Spinning Its Wheels Pointlessly...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Spell of the Circus.

It's really astonishing how completely pointless this entire... thing is.

And this for a strip that has always excelled at pointlessness.

The Latest Edition Of 'Skye Has It Bad For Zed'.

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

As we see more and more confirmations that the strip's continuity has gone gummy, I feel obligated to note that the Zed-Skye dynamic has been this bad at the bottom of it for years, and is probably the big reason all of Skye's relationships and potential relationships in the strip have flamed out. Muir's desire to hatefuck her is that complete and that possessive.

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

Healthy Parenting.

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

...

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

Which is still so fucking creepy.

Just A Few, Simple Reasonable Demands.

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

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

Aiming For Profundity, Hitting Word Salad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

In This Family, They Show How Wholesome They Are By Othering Members Who Don't Conform!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Officer 444.

And the awful joke about the woman who murdered her kids is a relief because it puts an end to the antisemitism.

For now.

"The Tsar Has Those Of The Tainted Blood Around Him!"

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

...

I see Muir is already picking his scapegoat in the Administration, and gosh, it's the Jewish son-in-law. It's astonishing how much of an out-and-out Nazi he's become, while imagining himself to be something that isn't.

War And Sexism! It's What Made The Country Great!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Social Buccaneer.

He treats this as such a stirring lesson and statement of values, instead of yet another display of his crudity, his racism, and of course, his tendency to try and use static panels as an artistic crutch.

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.

Almost A Funny Joke. Almost.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Midnight Man.

I don't know why Skye's gone Howler Monkey over that. Zed reacting with incredible aggression to everyday annoyances is pretty much normal.

"Dey Babies!" He Whines.

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

As Muir comforts himself that, yeah, yeah, things are going well, people are on HIS side, let's consider the many fails of this little strip.

Muir imagines he comes across as reasonable. He comes across as a bloodthirsty fascist.

Muir imagines he comes across as mature and his opponents as entitled and childish. In fact, not only does he come across entitled and childish, but his dismissal of his opponents as that underlines his moral vacuity and hypocrisy. Muir will shriek about how he is being tyrannically oppressed because his every bigoted whim isn't being indulged, but when actually tyrannical oppression is occurring, he won't merely applaud because his people are doing it. No, he'll whine that it isn't going far enough because anyone who doesn't agree with him isn't being liquidated.

Muir imagines that he comes across as calm and serene. In fact he comes across as panicked, because anyone who knows his work has seen this before--Muir shutting his eyes as the failures pile up and insisting that glorious victory is inevitable.

Stuff That Is Totally Happening, He's Sure Of It.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Red Glove.

Muir appears to have fallen for an online rumor hook, line, and sinker. Let's put aside the fact that the New IRA, the present group that actually occasionally does terrorism, has about 200 members, which makes its ability to perform this threat... shall we say, doubtful. The actual IRA--well, IRAs, there have been quite a few splinter groups--is a generally left-wing organization with traditional ties to the Palestinian liberation movement, who are largely more interested in getting the British out of Northern Ireland so the island can be united than this sort of blood and soil bullshit. But hey, Muir is convinced he just loves the Irish, so he falls for this. Which by the way, is largely being represented as coming from Irish and British intelligence sources. (Hell, fun fact, most of the Irish/Norn Iron bigot squad are resentful of this, and are convinced this is a government plot to tie them with being... terrorists!) But again, Muir thinks this is a cool thing, and more proof of how people everywhere are getting With It, and so we get this weird and horny gushing over the idea.

Do Not Tell These People About Bidets.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Lion's Claws.

It's interesting to try and parse what Muir views as "respecting another's culture", because this strip is so blatantly hypocritical you're left holding air. In the end of course the old equation--Muir demands everything from others, while insisting that nothing be required of him, and if this isn't followed, then he considers himself horribly oppressed.

He Thinks His Arrogant, Unthinking Bigotry Shows How Clever And Righteous He Is.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Brass Bullet.

As Muir insists that people who do in fact exist don't exist, I feel I must mention that at various points in his life Vlad III Tepes was the sworn vassal of the Ottoman Sultan...