Mike and JJ’s marriage was on the rocks long before Zeke showed up. Mike was wallowing in depression over a job he hated and wouldn’t do anything to deal with it despite JJ asking him to. He also did his best to have an affair with an old college flame (I think he changed his mind when he discovered she’d gained weight). Probably most importantly Mike had married a very young girl who mistakenly thought he was a romantic rebel because he’d taken her mother on a cross country motorcycle trip. Once she started growing up it became clear these were two people with little or nothing in common.
I think a lot of the reaction, whatever Zeke did or did not do (and Duke and son don’t get this sort of negative response) is essentially anger that JJ left Mike (even though it was pretty clear to me that there were reasons for it).
It’s very strange for me to reread these strips now that there is all of this negative commentary attached to them. Originally I just took the strips about JJ and Zeke as a humorous satirical take on an ex wife and her new amour. I don’t think there was ever any intention on the part of the cartoonist to engender this much hostility.
That reminds me of a cartoon I once saw in which a man pulls his scuba gear wearing cat out of the toilet tank saying “You can come out now, Fluffy, the landlord’s gone.”
While it can be hard to remember now, since Trump brought the whole thing so much farther downhill, but Bush’s nicknames were meant to be demeaning. It was a power play. At the time it was suggested that someone should have confronted him and said that it was disrespectful to elected representatives of the people to use those childish nicknames. It was also disrespectful to their constituents.
Where do JJ and Zeke live? From the mountain view it looks like they’re in Seattle like Mike & family. I thought they lived in NYC.