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.

In His Mind, The Founding Fathers Are Crude Assholes, Just Like Him.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Indians Are Coming!

...As I said yesterday, when you strip out the newer, purer strain of antisemitism Muir's been injecting into the strip, this is very much his usual tactic when he's afraid bad things are coming for he and his. Whining that the GOP is all traitors to whatever the best and proper form of Right Wing is at the moment.

POSTSCRIPT--Muir's expanded on this from where I first saw it, and yet the fascinating thing is how empty all this pseudo-scholarship is, a man shouting bigoted nonsense he has heard third or fourth hand and thinking this proves what an insightful scholar of the human condition he is.

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.

He Can Accept This As Wrong As Long As It's Clear White People Are The Real Victims.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Strings of Steel.

Once again, Muir demonstrating that this reconsideration of Israel doesn't come from a place of deep moral revaluation, it comes from him buying narratives that both confirm existing biases and frame this as another slight against whites. Because, once again, he's gotten really, really Nazi these days.

So Much Disgusting, Bigoted, Imaginary Winning.

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

You know, there's just one fascinating bit to that disgusting, pathetic childish bit of idiocy, Muir's most grotesque visit yet to the 'Pork is Muslim kryptonite' well. This is the first strip in the sequence not to be a completely muddled mess. It's repulsive, yes, but it has a beginning, a middle and an end that build off each other.  Comic-Trump and Comic-Mamdani may bear only the slightest of resemblance to the actual individuals they're based on, but at least they don't seem to be changing course mid-talk.

Of course, the problem is it is part of that sequence, which turns it into yet another bizarre swerve, as not only does this confirm that yes, Mamdani was in there, and thus, did hear all that, but Trump once again pivots wildly from his attitude in the previous strip.

But hey, he made that dirty paynim smell his fart, so yay, I guess.

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.

"Just Gotta Purge Those Elitist Upper Class Race Traitors! Nip Things In The Blood--I Mean, Bud!"

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.

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.

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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.

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.

They Want To Keep The Imagined Immigrants Out, But Import Their Imagined Values.

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

As Muir declares victory yet again, because in the game in his head, he will not only shift the goalposts in whatever directions he wants, he will change the points system, we await him explaining that gay rights and women's equality are evil lies and another things the masses have wisely abandoned as we enter the new age of chudifcation. 

This present 'the cast just yammers at each other plotline' is so tiresome. It just emphasizes how unpleasant the cast are. They are simply awful and hateful and they think that all this makes them better than other people.

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.

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.

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...

That Is, In Fact, Not What The Quran Says.

It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Voice on the Wire.

As we watch Muir repeat the Right-wing urban legend that pork functions as some sort of Muslim kryptonite, let's recall that I'm pretty sure it was Sam who drove the feral hogs in there originally.

But then, as we keep seeing, time and space are bendable in DbD and causality can be warped at will.

The Point Is... Urrr, Yeah, There's A Point.

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

Sometimes, Sam really gets to revel in the crossgender Id thing. And moments like these tend to be just those times, Muir trying to demonstrate that he's smart and learned, he is, but also rough and In Your Face.

Astonishingly, Muir Is Sure Everything Was Great When Muir Was A Kid.

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

And Muir once again demonstrates that Sam is now on Marvel's comic time, where her age can vary wildly from strip to strip. Of course, we've seen Muir wax sentimental about the 1970s before, the era where he was a kid--but an old enough kid to have some freedom. And by the time he stopped being a kid during it, Jimmy Carter was in charge, so Muir could tell himself all the bad things were his fault. Because, obviously, this is a stunningly simplistic, naive, even incorrect summation of the 1970s.

Another thing poking out is that Muir misses large swathes of what the society of the New Deal built that his people have been working to destroy. But he can't accept that, so he has to tell himself that it was great despite all that "socialism" and also, if we bring back the racism, things will be good again. Hence his continued allegiance to the people trying to do that, despite the fact that they keep failing.

To quote, Dylan, only a pawn in their game.

Zed Of The Apes Doesn't Understand Your Politics, Woman.

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

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Muir giving into all of his antisemitic impulses, all of them, has certainly been a thing.