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.

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.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 8: When Muir Loved Dubya.

 The political world of the Mystery Business(TM) Era, especially the Early Period, is quite unique for the strip. Where the story of Day by Day has been steadily ratcheting paranoia, racism and delusion since the election of Obama, this point in time isn't like that. Oh, there's racism and a LOT of delusion, but it tends to lurk in the corners and under surface, so to speak.

No, what's clearest about this time is how much more confident and content Muir is. It's not that his base politics are any less vile. He's still racist, still misogynistic, still authoritarian. But seeing yourself on the clearly winning side, with your opponents locked out forever makes him somewhat mellow. Total victory is almost assuredly at hand, so yeah, you just have to wait, and they'll either see that you're right, or be irrelevant nobodies forever on the margins. And that sense of assurance can give Muir a deceptive appearance of acceptance. He's a reactionary asshole through and through--he will demonstrate this constantly--but he hasn't gone down as many crazy rabbit holes as he will later. A Muir who thinks feminism is dying is a sexist Muir who isn't calling for the end to female suffrage. A Muir who thinks that Blacks are starting to accept a proper American viewpoint is a racist Muir who isn't a naked white supremacist. And a Muir who thinks the nation understands what needs to be done and that the right people will be in charge to do this forevermore is an authoritarian Muir who isn't an outright fascist calling for either dictatorship or a coup against the leftist pretenders who think daring to, ha, win an election means something. He's rotten at the core of him, but there's so much less of that core showing, being rubbed raw by exposure  to the world. 

And that's the essential essence of Mystery Business(TM) Era DbD, especially in the Early Period. This is a Muir who thinks that he's won. That Bill Clinton has been demonstrated to be a fluke. That the story's finished, and all he has to do is ride along and laugh at those losers who dared to oppose he and his. It's a sense that will not last--it will in fact be starting to crack up by the tail end of the Mystery Business(TM) Era. And once it's gone, it is gone forever. Muir will never get it back, least of all because he'll start demanding impossible things from the people he imagines can restore it for it.

But what does this mean? Well, in the political scene outside the cozy offices of Mystery Business(TM), we generally focus on three things, two domestic, and one foreign. Domestically we have on one side, Dubya, and his advisors, presented as a bunch of wily, capable statesmen, and on the other, the Democrats, a pathetic, crooked ineffectual opposition laboring under the delusion they can somehow beat Dubya.  The depictions of Dubya will seem eerily familiar to those used to Muir's depiction of the Trump presidency--a Republican president widely seen as being thick is portrayed as an extremely capable and canny political operator with the common touch. The Democrats, on the other hand, are a lot more farcical than their latter day Evil Conspiracy of Evil iteration. Muir may view them as crooks, but petty crooks, running ineffectual schemes as the inevitable Permanent Republican Majority grinds them to dust.

In foreign policy we largely focus on the forces of terrorism, uniformly brown-skinned and Muslim, who are just as hapless as the Democrats, but also much eviler. The buildup to and fighting of the war in Iraq takes the same tone, with foreign nations and international organizations who object being likewise painted as ineffectual and corrupt. This opposition will also produce portraits of an anti-war Left as a barely-differentiated mass of latter day hippies for Muir to scorn and metaphorically punch. This will produce an actual character in time, but for now, they exist to be a counterpart of Muir's Liberal Character Who Is Always Wrong, these being somehow More Wrong. 

This the political world of DbD in this time period. One side holds all the power, and is always right. Muir may object to a few individual Republicans, such as Trent Lott and John McCain, but by and large, he is blithely supportive of the GOP and especially the Dubya Administration. He is absolutely convinced of their power and popularity, and just as certain that nothing they can do will ever end it.

This will have very notable effects in the future.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 7: The Four Man Band Plays On.

 And so we have laid out the central cast, who are going to drive the action for the next decade or so, with only two significant characters joining during this period. This doubtless seems like a small cast, because, well, it is. But in truth it's even worse. As noted, Zed and Sam largely function as one character, and Damon is essentially just a riff on those same basic character traits. And so the strip at this point often feels like three almost identical jackasses against their dimwitted liberal foil. Zed, Sam and Damon spend most of their time whining or smugly demonstrating their own swollen egos. Jan falls into what I like to term the 'Elmer Fudd Problem'; much like Elmer Fudd, she's an obvious patsy who is only there to fail. Fudd only works, so much as he does, because Bugs Bunny is likable and witty, and Fudd at least has some theoretical power over him, even if he's completely incompetent at using it. And you see the problem here--Zed, Sam and Damon are neither of those things despite supposing to be, and while Jan is sometimes drawn as having some vague sort of authority over the others, it's never laid out, or used to create a story. Most of the time, she's simply a peer who is always wrong.

Indeed, looking at the cast dynamics, it's astonishing how they lack any real internal conflict. Zed, Sam and Damon all largely agree and get along. They have the occasional petty squabble and prank, but nothing seems to dent the group's camaraderie. Damon shows an initial interest in Sam that could clearly fuel a storyline--but it's discarded in a few strips, and from that point onwards, even when they are not officially in  a relationship, Sam and Zed are in a relationship. And with that, all the cast has is grumbling and whining how stupid other people are, complaining about petty annoyances, and in essence, being awful, while the narrative supports them.

Because that's the real problem here. There's nothing wrong, in a comedy, with having your cast be awful so long as you, the writer, understand they are awful. Seinfeld... Curb Your Enthusiasm... It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia...  hell, The Three Stooges all work with the understanding that the central characters are fundamentally miserable people and the authors of most of their own misfortune. But that's not what happens here. Muir depicts whiny, privileged jackasses and imagines that they are put-upon everymen. The closest thing to an actual plotline with conflict is the Damon-Jan "will they/won't they?" tango, and that is clumsily handled, unappealing, and fairly intermittent at this stage of the strip. On some level, Damon and Jan are treated as a potential couple because Sam and Zed are a couple, and Muir had two characters of what he viewed as the appropriate genders left over, and no ability to realize that, actually, pairing these characters up would be a bad idea. And that is it. The strip involves the interactions of three deeply unpleasant people who all vibe with one another, a fourth unpleasant character they all mildly clash with, and that's the emotional core of the strip. To a very limited amount of emotion.

Now, I plan on looking on the political side of the strip in the next installment, but as it touches everything, I'll have to deal with it here too. And once again, we find the same problem... there's only one real opinion in the group. Damon is supposed to be the "Conservative", and Sam and Zed are supposed to be fairly apolitical moderates... but Muir drops that fairly early. Sam and Zed wind up having virtually the same opinion as Damon, while simply holding them a bit less stridently at this point in time. Any disagreements aren't actual disagreements, they are simply variations in degree. The only person offering a different viewpoint is Jan, and she holds comical distortions of the opinions of Muir's opponents that she expresses ineptly. That the rest of the cast regularly fails to rebut them is more down to Muir's intellectual poverty than anything else.

And that's a big problem right there. Muir's cast doesn't work right from the get-go for any of the things he wants to use it for. And, well, it's only going to get worse.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 6: The Liberal Stooge.

 And now we wrap up that little cast with the other primarily political character, Jan, who, in the Early Period, sits in a strange relation with her fellows. For a start, Sam, Zed and Damon all have jobs in Mystery Business(TM)'s technical areas--even though it should be noted Damon's isn't ever named in strip, but still, that he is involved in that is made reasonably clear. Jan however, is in Marketing, something that she will yammer about in place of a personality trait well after Mystery Business(TM) is shuttered. This puts a clear line between her and the rest--they all do something tangible in... whatever it is Mystery Business(TM) does, while Jan... well, theoretically, she's supposed to be helping to sell it, though I'm not sure Muir gets that. But more importantly, she's doing something abstract that Muir clearly sees as meaningless busy work. Indeed, Jan's exact position in Mystery Business(TM) is somehow more nebulous than Damon's unnamed one--frequently, she's depicted as holding some level of authority over the others, to allow her to perform the beats a "boss" character would. This makes no sense, but so it goes. All of it is ultimately about setting Jan up for her purpose in the political portion of the strip--being the lone "liberal" member of the cast.

Jan's general purpose at this point in the strip is to be a comic straight man, and a very specific sort of one. She's not an occasionally witty voice of sanity observing and commenting on the lunacy surrounding her. She's a stooge. Jan says stupid things and asks stupid questions so the others can riff of her. You don't laugh with this Jan, you laugh at her. Early Period Jan is a pill. At her best, she's sheltered and naive, the perfect gull who still confident she is so much smarter than you. At her worst, she is shallow and self-righteous, constantly demanding attention and validation.  Hence the job that Muir largely paints as useless and also manipulative. Everything about Jan at this point is supposed to underline her status as someone who's the butt of the joke, and just wrong.

Now, Muir does not do a good job of this. A problem that has been with him from the start is that his own opinions are, well, shallow and ill-considered, so to a reader not predisposed to simply nod along, Jan doesn't come across an idiot arguing with sensible people, she comes across as an idiot arguing with worse idiots. Jan is portrayed not as some well-reasoned statement against liberalism, but as a caricature of and snarl against "Vaguely Leftish Coffee-house Types Who The Writer Resents", She is, to Muir, a Spoiled Well-to-Do White Girl, talking about things she doesn't understand.

Now this will change in the future. Indeed, this version of Jan will be largely discarded not only in future Eras, but over the course of the Late Mystery Business(TM) Period. But at this point, she tends to stay in her lane. Jan's job is to be zinged off of, and zinged off she is.

With very bad zingers.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 5; Ol' Zip, He Be A Larned Skolar!

And now we move to the next member of the cast, the one built from the start to be blatantly political, the one who got the first little storyline in the strip, Damon. I should warn you that this is going to be a long one, as this is likely going to be the only one of these little essays focused on Damon. (He will likely be discussed in future essays, but only as part of the ensemble.) Part of this is, as I've noted, Damon has faded in importance considerably over the years, something that started during the Transition Era. I've compared him to Barney Google for how he's collapsed into the background of a strip he used to be a star of, but perhaps a better comparison would be Peanuts' Shermy, a character everybody but real Charles Schultz fans are going to go "Who?" about, which really proves my point. (The best part is this gives Jan a counterpart in the form of Patty, and no, not Peppermint Patty, this is the original Patty in Peanuts who faded into the background early along with Shermy.) Damon's gone from one of the central members of the ensemble cast to popping up every now and then, even when Muir tries to feature him more, his place taken by new characters, but also by a pair of old regulars who have become even more central to the strip.

But there's another reason for this--Damon is one of the easiest characters to write about. Characters in Day by Day don't generally develop, but they do change as Muir moves them into different roles, and that is something we will talk about in the future. For Straw Liberals, this can sometimes mimic character development, but it isn't really. But again, that's for the future. For a clearer example, Zed and Sam were a pair of urban professionals, and are now a pair of rural rednecks while keeping many of the same essential character traits. Change. Not development. But Damon though, doesn't change. His role in the strip remains exactly the same throughout. The Damon of these modern times is the same character that Muir started with, serving the same function. He's just drawn differently. Damon's circumstances may have changed, but this doesn't alter him, because again, Muir's characters do not develop. They sit in their slot, and they stay in their slot, unless Muir suddenly decides they should be in a different slot. And that, as I've noted before, will note in this, and will likely note in future installments, is why Damon just faded into the background. Muir changes much more than the characters he writes, and the Muir of today has little need for Damon, even if this lack of need does seem to feel somewhat awkward to him, resulting in the occasional attempt to push him forward back into the main cast that inevitably fails, and then he slides back into the background again.

Now, a quick explanation of the title of this installment that will seem like a digression at first--this is a line (or rather a version of a line) from an infamous minstrel show song, about one of the more notable minstrel characters. (It was also set to the tune we now largely know as 'Turkey in the Straw' one of the reasons that tune has acquired... implications of late.) Zip Coon, who so far as we can tell is the fictional character who made that word a racist slur, was different from some of the other minstrel show standards, like Jim Crow or Tambo and Mr. Bones. Where they were largely about portraying Blacks as lovable, slightly shiftless dimwits who whites could easily feel superior to, Zip... well, he had a somewhat more sinister agenda. Oh, Zip was just as stupid as Jim and the rest, but he didn't think he was. Zip thought he was clever, and that gave him airs. Yes, Zip was the original uppity negro, and most minstrels shows were filled with his efforts to bamboozle others with ridiculous high-flown language, including, as a rule, at least one ludicrous monologue filled with malapropisms, actual nonsense words, dog Latin, and sometimes even pig Latin. The underlying idea, for whites, was that Blacks might imagine they're smart, but they're wrong, and that the Black People who do it are prone to become incompetent crooks. That said, Zip was arguably one of the only elements of minstrel shows that had any complexity. Part of what made Zip amusing to audiences is that even as he attempts his ludicrous falsehoods, on some level he buys his own bullshit. As he speaks obvious nonsense, he imagines that this torrent of words is doubtless showing everyone how ingenious he is. Zip was paradoxically both lazy and shiftless, and yet constantly scheming. And if fans of old radio shows are thinking, wait, this sounds familiar, yes, this is the character type that the Kingfish, of Amos 'n' Andy fame, emerged from and from him quite a few other comic schemers. Now, as should be clear, Damon is a modern bit of minstrelsy, a white man creating a Black character to make jokes about Black people and one might be tempted to consider him a descendant of Zip. But he's not. Oh, Damon is something much worse.

Damon is a Black character who possesses only a nominal Blackness. For all that Damon shouts that liberals and Democrats only judge him by his skin, that is the only claim to Blackness as a character that he has. Damon has no connection nor interest in Black culture and Black history. Indeed, he even possesses no Black relatives, being by his account, an orphan with no family. He is completely severed from the Black experience, not only by upbringing, but by author fiat. Damon faces no hindrances by being Black. In the upside-down world Muir has crafted, the only problem his race causes him is the irritation of arrogant liberals pestering him about not fulfilling his stereotype, and about the only way he interacts with Black culture is to dismiss it. The only narrative functions of Damon's Blackness are to allow him to rail against the "real racism" of liberals and leftism and all their social programs, and to give Muir cover to announce radical conservative politics and dismiss liberal concerns. He is white man playing a Black man to tell other whiny, bigoted white racists that yes, everything you think about race and politics is correct, and the people who claim otherwise are just stupid and deluded. An actual worse form of a minstrel show character.

And that is really why Damon has fallen to the wayside. Muir no longer feels he needs to have a Black character say this. Zed and Sam can announce this racist blather openly, the Redneck Elite explaining everybody's proper place to them. Which leaves Damon hanging around, increasingly useless in a strip that clearly thought he was going to be a main feature.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 4: Essentially, One Character.

 And so now, we reach a look at the cast, and as I have mentioned it is a very small, downright rudimentary one at this point. Over the next few years, the cast will largely remain fixed at four regulars, finally moving up to five for reasons that are actually quite simple (and will be explored later). There will be only a handful of supporting characters introduced, two of whom are parents of the regulars. (They're also some of the only ones to persist.) As I noted previously, Muir's strip has a very threadbare feel, in its earliest stages.

And with those first two characters introduced, we hit a fascinating wrinkle, because those two characters are, as the title of this post indicates, essentially one character. Sam and Zed begin the comic figuratively joined at the hip, and so they stay, frequently becoming literally so in many future strips. Right from the start, the pair's most common use are strips where they bounce the same point of view back at one another. It is downright uncanny.

It's not that Muir doesn't give them what are largely superficial differences. Zed is in 'design', and Sam is an 'engineer'--implicitly a technical engineer. But while Sam liking to fiddle with machines is going to remain a source of gags, in truth, their jobs are barely going to be touched on. Gender is the biggest one, but again, Muir just uses this for shallow, sexist gags and of course, to have Zed and Sam get in a relationship. Perhaps the most significant difference takes its cue from the famous line of As Good As It Gets (which we know Muir watched and knows, because he will reference this very line in a future cartoon)--"I think of a man, then I take away reason and accountability." Sam is Zed with much less of a filter and more of a tendency to fly off the handle, an embodied Id who gets to perform most of the joint character's worst impulses. But again, this isn't as profound a difference as it sounds--it frequently does feel that Sam is 'Zed if he was a woman who just did the things he thinks about doing'.

Now, another aspect of Zed and Sam's role in the strip in the early days is that they are clearly supposed to largely focus on the apolitical side of things, which can come as a surprise to readers used to their present role as embodiments of the proud redneck volk that are the nation's rightful masters. At this point in the strip, they generally focus on slice of life strips, and their time is most often spent complaining about their jobs, and whining about getting old. These are probably the most human characters have been in DbD, and even here one shouldn't overstate things. Muir's strips on these subjects are for the most part cliched, repetitive, and irritating, and often just as sloppily executed as the political strips. But still, at this point, Zed and Sam are meant to be mortals, schlubs, an average Joe, and the somewhat above-average Jill that has taken a shine to the former. That's not going to last.

Oh, is it not going to last.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 3; Setting the Stage

Day by Day opens with the simplest setup imaginable. Indeed, it is so simple, it's barely a setup at all. Characters are shown, introduce each other to one another, and give their job titles. For the first strip, a weak joke about their jobs is given. For the next, we get a weak effort at political humor. That's it.

As I've noted many times, there's a certain threadbare quality to all this. Muir is putting up the minimum effort in his setup, and the result is a fictional universe that feels like it only just started up when we came in. Of course, that's true of the start of any fictional universe, but a good artist can hide the joins so to speak. Muir doesn't even bother. We start with characters all just meeting, even though it's heavily implied they've all worked at this place for awhile. Even worse, Mystery Business(tm) is clearly not a large firm, and Muir's laser focus on the central cast makes it seem even smaller. And so, we get people who clearly should have bumped into each other before now... just bumping into each other, with no real sense of other people who could have served as insulation. We do not get many strips with unseen coworkers being griped about or briefly appearing coworkers to add a sense of scale. Mystery Business(tm) seems initially to consist of just these four characters, and while Muir will briefly gesture at there being other people there, it will never be for very long. Only two coworkers who aren't main staff will be named, and neither will be given much focus. (Though one will rank a nasty off-screen death that will be mentioned years later.)

Now, part of this is there's a sense that DbD at this stage is as much the strip Muir thinks he should be writing at this point in time as it is the strip he wants to write, and these values are going to jostle each other quite a bit in these early years. But there's a fundamental shoddiness that Muir is never going to outgrow. 

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 2: The Divisions Within The Divisions

I'll start with noting that this wasn't the originally planned Part 2 of this series, but that I realized that I had another thing to define before getting into the nitty gritty. So, we've got this one, about the subdivisions of the divisions I've made.

Eras are big overarching stretches of the strip marked by common creative threads. (Even if, in the case of the Transition Era, those threads consist of 'being stuck between two clearly delineated eras' and 'watching Muir struggle to figure out what he wanted to do with the strip'.) But within the eras, there are similar divisions, story threads taken up then abandoned, style choices that come and go, obsessions and oddities that appear, then disappear. Taking a hint from geologists, these will be called periods.

Now, I expect that the future Eras are going to be quite involved, but the Mystery Business(tm) Era is a simpler beast--it divides cleanly into the Early Mystery Business(tm) Period, 2002 to 2004, and the Late Mystery Business(tm) Period, 2005 to 2007. The Early Period is both formative, and also, clearly something Muir is doing as a hobby. Both 2003 and 2004 see him take lengthy hiatuses, and even in 2002, where the strip is active for only two months, he still manages to miss a day.

The Late Period, however, marks the brief apogee of Muir's mainstream involvement. From 2005 to late in 2007, Day by Day was actually syndicated in a handful of newspapers. This saw Muir attempting a more rigorous, professional attempt to produce strips on time, and also saw some developments in the characters and politics of the strip, which will be gone into later. This syndication ended abruptly--likely of self-inflicted wounds on Muir's part--and so by the end of the Late Period, Muir was transitioning the strip back to online only.

And this brings up something connected to all this that has to be mentioned--the Mystery Business(tm) Era is the shortest by a significant margin. The only one that is presently shorter is the Gunpowder Era, and that is presently ongoing, and should outstep it during the course of this year. The Compound and Transition Eras outpace it by a year and multiple months, and even that undersells its brevity, because again, there are significant hiatuses in the Early Period comics. The foundational era of Day by Day has the least strips. I suspect there's something to this, and yes, I will go into it in the near future.

The Mystery Business(TM) Era; Part 1, Defining Things.

 I suggested I might write more on the eras of this comic strip, and damn it, I shall do so, hopefully one little article every Saturday. However, I've decided to expand the project some, and go into detail on each era, partially, because, well, there's a lot to write about, and partially to give myself time to review them.

So, let's start with the definition... what exactly is the Mystery Business(tm) Era?

The Mystery Business(tm) Era is the period from the strip's beginning in November of 2002, and ending in 2007, where the four members of the central cast all worked at the same unspecified business. While the cast's jobs were all laid out, what exactly this firm did never was, a long-standing tradition in the sort of workplace comedy that early DbD aspired to be.

Or more precisely insisted it aspired to be. The workplace comedy elements in Mystery Business(tm) Era DbD were always quite weak, and frequently Mystery Business(tm) seemed like little more than a place that the cast talked about politics in, and occasionally were shown working. Further, Muir never really expanded the cast that much during this period, making the setting seem exceedingly thin. It very much contrasts with the Byzantine weirdness of later eras. Though not necessarily in a good way--indeed, I'd argue that early DbD was very much a bad strip, just a different sort of bad strip than the present version. It was both yet another bad Right Wing Attempt at Their Own Doonesbury, and Half-Assed Dilbert Ripoff. And it was the closest Muir would ever get to mainstream success.

All of which makes it stand out, among the Robot Craziness of later years.

"Yes, That's Right! She Was Burning The Coal!"

It's the Day's Day of Days!  Because sore throat.

Sometimes, Muir really, really stretches to remind you that his cast our thoroughly vile people.

Fifteen Years Of Increasingly Insane Bullshit.

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

So, Muir admitting that the "Workplace Comic" years operated from a thin premise.

Which is still somehow better then the utter batshit premises they've come to operate on.