Again, Charming Family Values.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Fire Fighters.

Perfect. Now we're not only getting the standard DbD sleazy business, we're getting nostalgia for DbD sleazy businesses past.

Those Good Ol' Fashioned Family Values...

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

Ahh, yes, Muir returning to the old well of 'Let's start up a horny business'. Like the dog to its vomit, et cetera, et cetera.

The Uncanny Valley Of Human Relations.

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

...

I have said it on multiple occasions--Muir has never been that good about having the cast interact with each other, but over the last decade it's gotten downright off-putting, especially the moments like that when he's clearly aiming for warm and happy.

Remember When They Ruled Over This County With An Iron Grip?

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Ace of Spades.

As we watch Muir's characters express their fury about having any obligations to anybody and their indignation that there are law enforcement bodies that don't just shoot brown people and leftist scum, a reminder that just two years ago, this place was insisting it was a separatist republic under the rule of this family.

And You Know This Misogyny Is Right, Because An Imaginary Woman Is Saying It!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Phantom Fortune.

The fascinating thing is that Muir is doing this to make us care about this couple. 

And he has succeeded. In that I now want something horrible to happen to them so they don't breed. They are that fucking awful.

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 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.

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.

...

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.

...

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.

...

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

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.

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 Family Dynamics Just Keep Being Awkward.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Breaking Through.

...

...

At this point, I think it's safe to say this going places Muir doesn't even realize it's going.

Sam Overshares Even In The Parody Sequences.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Man of Might.

...

This is Muir's idea of quirky family dynamics.

And effective fund-raising.

He's Tried Nothin', And He's All Outta Ideas!

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Purple Mask.

I consider this the unofficial confirmation that Muir ended that previous storyline early.

Wrote Himself Into A Corner, So He Boldly Wrote Himself Out Of It.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Goddess.

There's a part of me that suspects that Muir started to realize on some level that he was revealing how little he actually knew about the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War, on top of which he had no way to wrap the storyline up, so... 

The escape hatch.

They Did Not, In Fact, Know Their History.

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

As Muir pulls out one of his most tired running gags in this baffling attempt at a storyline, I should mention this underlines the vast ignorance under his pose of learned patriot. Franklin, obviously wasn't in Boston during the Massacre--aside from this being well after he'd largely moved to Philadelphia, it was when he was the Colonial Postmaster, and in fact, living in England.

But then, Muir is stuck in the Kiddies' Own version of history.

Still Not Answering The 'Real Time Travel' Or 'Simulated Time Travel' Question...

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Gunfighters of the Northwest.

Muir remains all in on the whole 'remind the audience of better works' thing...

'Alley Oop' Did It Better. And That Reminds Me I'm Probably One Of The Few People Who Knows About 'Alley Oop'.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Blackhawk. 

So, is this going to be a time travel story, or a VR simulation story with time travel elements?

Ehh, mostly a chance for Muir to bludgeon us with his ignorant jingoism masquerading as patriotism. Again.

Astonishing How All The Cast's Business Endeavors Through The Years Wind Up Involving Nudity.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Cody of the Pony Express.

It's grimly fascinating how much use Muir's gotten out of that single picture of two sitting hicks.