It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Ghost City.
Muir's ability to pivot on AI in a way that's both witless AND cruel remains a sight to behold. The unlikely, imagined image of scientists losing their livelihoods to the machines makes him chuckle, for they are infected by the woke and have people who are not white guys doing things. But when he remembers the things are scanning his work, he gets so offended.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Radio King.
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He is so checked out right now. Just look at this. There is nothing to really talk about because this strip is just... nothing.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Perils of the Yukon.
So now we're combing the 'overly-protective dad' jokes with the robots.
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This comic is so in the weeds right now.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The White Horseman.
As we stare at this muddled, meaningless attempt at profundity, I'd say it's amazing that Muir wants to go there on the Epstein files, but let's be honest, he's clearly retreated into another one of his incoherent alternate universes on the subject.
I will start with a simple statement. Muir's art, to begin with, was very bad.
And it has somehow managed only to get worse since then.
So, the breakdown. To start with, Muir's line work is terrible--awkward, choppy and graceless, with the appearance of a rough sketch having been given a very rudimentary clean up digitally. Characters' bodies are generally a sort of blobbish shape. Women are a skinnier blobbish shape with a few other shapes attached, but that's a discussion we'll get into later. The body is completed with a pair of very noodly arms and either an oval, smoothed rectangle, or oval and triangle attached to serve as a head and face, with a lot of very elementary work done to cover this up. One can argue that this is an almost universal technique, but one is supposed to develop further techniques to mask this and Muir had not. He is bad at hands, producing both lots of people holding mugs, other things and putting them in pockets and other, more dreadful horrors. Eyes are slits or covered with glasses. Women usually have a stereotypical "cupid's bow" to serve as a mouth (especially in closeups), and men usually don't have a mouth, just some sort of beard and mustache combination that serves to fame where the mouth might be. Obviously, as these are drawings, exceptions will exist, but they're usually not improvements, just the odd panel where Zed or Damon flashes a toothy grimace.
Backgrounds are worse--undeveloped, monochromatic planes most of the time, with the occasional prop thrown in either as filler or for the characters to interact with. Badly. Muir is terrible at perspective, resulting in things like tables that exist simultaneously level with and at angle from the characters, and an overall flat, unreal look. The cast, on the whole, seem to move through a badly abstracted world, one that is barely keeping itself together. It's not unusual to see a standing cast member apparently hefting a laptop around as they use it, the stand-up desk that is implicitly there on examination being left out as an unimportant detail. And it gets worse.
Muir's fascination with cutting and pasting stock poses as a short cut is already evident. Any perusal of the archive acquaints one with such classics as Zed/Damon pouring coffee, Zed/Damon holding some sort of handheld device awkwardly, Jan/Sam practicing yoga on their desk, and of course, Cast Stands Around. Sometimes a character will be presented in the same pose throughout an entire strip; other times, they be presented in essentially the same pose with subtle differences, but done in a choppy manner so that there is no illusion of motion.
And indeed, that's another big problem with Muir's art at this stage. He's bad at action, so most of the time, the feel is of looking at a series of still images. And of course, one might say that is what you're doing... but a good comic artist can make your mind fill in the gaps. Muir doesn't do that. There is something truly lifeless in his imagery, and many of his habits and practices make things worse. Further, some of his habits--for example, something that happened multiple occasions, Damon or Zed spending entire strips pouring coffee into a single mug during a conversation--managed to be not merely lifeless, but broke the strip's reality as they did this.
And now we come to another matter--Muir's cheesecake, his attempts to draw female characters for titillation. Note 'attempts'. He's really bad at this. First off, at this stage, his drawings of the female form are like the rest of his artwork, very crude and angular. There's a weird sense of abstraction here that undercuts what Muir's attempting--my joke at the time was 'cubist cheesecake'.
While this more or less nullifies what Muir's attempting, it doesn't disguise it. Women constantly pose for the imaginary camera, leaning over or back, and arching their legs. Their outfits are generally skimpy--Sam favors flowing dresses, and Jan... Jan's favorite outfit involves a pair of low-rise cargo pants that somehow stay on despite gravity, not infrequently revealing a little whale tail. A corporate executive dressing like That One Intern.
Everything named here is going to get worse in the future. Especially the cheesecake. We will explore why it all somehow got worse in time. But one thing that was arguably holding it back from achieving its later levels of awful was that Muir wasn't trying too hard at this stage. For most of the Mystery Business(tm) Era, it was a largely dialogue-driven office comedy, which wasn't even really attempting much action to begin with. It was a bad office comedy, with bad dialogue, and the art mostly failed at what it was attempting, but oh, God, do we have such deep failures to consider up ahead, as Muir decided he was going to follow his dream and try to be a latter-day Milt Caniff.
You might wonder how such a bad artist got the treatment he did even in the face of Right Wing cultural desperation. As we're going to demonstrate... it was very much a matter of knowing the right people.
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.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Vanishing Dagger.
And we segue right from the latest awful robot sex plot back into the latest awful 'Evil Conspiracy of Evil be perving' plot. All of which underlines the extent to which Muir is out of ideas, and his eternal need to bemoan how put upon his cast is.
With their hi-tech robot bodyguards we've just had to endure a ridiculous plotline about.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because King of the Circus.
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I assume somebody paid to have this be their cameo in the strip.
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That apparently is what we're looking at here.
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The mind boggles.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Moon Riders.
Well, more proof you can always count on Muir to double down on bad ideas on the vague notion that they'll work if he just keeps at them.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Flaming Disc.
I've said it before, and I will say it again... I am just in the weeds about the robot sex jokes.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Jungle Goddess.
As we look at this lazy little cartoon, let's all savor the fact that these days you don't even have to wait a comic or two for Muir's declaration of how very much Nazis the Democrats are to be ironically undercut by him using Nazi-style rhetoric.
These days, it usually follows in a panel or two.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because A Dangerous Adventure.
Somehow, the feigned humility only makes the noxious ego that underlies all this stand out even more.
Also, the bad fanservice hits extra-nightmare fuel here.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Miracles of the Jungle.
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There's something amazing in Muir's ability to make something that is supposed to be nothing happening feel like an extra level of nothing, filler that seems astonishingly free of actual content. It's a bad kind of amazing, but it's still amazing.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because Breaking Through.
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At this point, I think it's safe to say this going places Muir doesn't even realize it's going.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Lost City.
Somehow, this manages to be half-cooked and disjointed even among strips where Muir has given up being anything but half-cooked and disjointed.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Invisible Hand.
We're just getting smashed over the head with movies Muir liked in his twenties at this point.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Secret Kingdom.
Here we get another example of Muir thinking a display of his ignorance is a display of knowledge, and a display of his pathologies is a display of artistic vision.
It's the Day's Day of Days! Because The Strange Case of Mary Page.
It's almost a perfect representation of the strip these days--cheap sexism, ranting about "communism", and a lousy attempt at a gag. Really, just some racism, and this would have been the Platonic DbD of this era.
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.
