Deadbert.
So it was in the early ’90s, not long after Dilbert‘s debut and my discovery of the strip, that I did a circuit through all the local bookstores attempting to track down the handful of reprint books that existed at that point. Dilbert hadn’t quite become the huge sensation it was about to be, or at least word that it was a sensation hadn’t got around to those bookstores, as it took some doing to find those particular volumes.
I believe there were only four of these books at the time, and technically one of them (Dogbert’s Clues for the Clueless, pictured here) didn’t contain reprints but rather was all-new material. I continued to buy these as they were released over the years, a few dozen publications that, as I just checked in my home library, occupy a good portion of a shelf. Along the way I had a Dilbert desk calendar, and somewhere I still have a squeezable Dilbert stress doll. I subscribed to the email newsletter. I watched the TV show adaptation (which surprised me by featuring an opening theme reworked from the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo’s, and Danny Elfman’s, theme for the movie Forbidden Zone).
In other words, I was pretty much all in on the strip. It wasn’t unusual for me to want to track down all the reprint books for a strip I suddenly became enamored of. I came across a copy of a Foxtrot book completely by accident a decade or two ago, and I’m still buying those even now. I scraped together whatever money I had for each Bloom County reprint. I walked out of a mall bookstore with the then-latest Calvin and Hobbes I’d just purchased, only to run into a classmate who mockingly asked “why’d you get that?” “Because it’s awesome,” I told her. …And up until I kinda burnt out on the strip, I had every Doonesbury collection.
And that’s just a few. That doesn’t even bring up Peanuts (of which I had plenty, but the complete reprinting by Fantagraphics was a godsend), and my scattershot paperbacks of series that haven’t had the complete treatment yet (like B.C., the early strips of which remain wildly uproarious).
Like I mentioned regarding Doonesbury, sometimes I would say “okay, I’ve read enough” and just fall off buying the books. In Doonesbury‘s case, it wasn’t anything specific that turned me off. I still liked the strip just fine. It may been as simple as “I didn’t have the budget to keep going.” But for whatever reason, I stopped, though I do occasionally wonder what those characters are up to now, and kind of miss getting the year’s worth of continuity (or however long it was) in a new volume to plow through.
Dilbert had what one could charitably say was a “utilitarian” art style, just barely as good as it needed to be to deliver the jokes. As the strip continued and evolved, that art’s early quirks and inconsistencies eventually coalesced and smoothed out into a consistent style, one that maybe perhaps wouldn’t be lauded with the grand masters of the form, but at least had a level of professionalism that made it look less slapdash.
And the jokes were usually pretty good, and the characters were amusing (the put-upon title character, the hapless boss, the cunning Dogbert, and my favorite, the perpetually industriously-lazy Wally), and the strip kept my interest for many, many years.
Perhaps more years than I really should have.
There was…something the strip’s creator did, or said…I forgot what, exactly, that made me feel a twinge of guilt the next time I ordered a copy of the newest reprint volume. I think there may have even been a strip or two in that book that addressed whatever it was, in a way that of course put the cartoonist and his point of view into the right. I lack the specifics only because I’ve never gone back to reread this book and more solidly affix this event in my memory.
I may have brushed this off as an example of “well, pobody’s nerfect!” and bought the following volume as well. But I stopped very shortly after that, I believe either in response to yet another thing he said/did, or simply because of my increased awareness of some of his opinions, as noted in this article about “The Metafilter Incident”, in which he pretended to be an online fan of himself to…do something, I guess.
So I was already off the Dilbert train when his latest hoohar, and apparently last straw for just about everyone, was unleashed. I know he’s saying nobody’s giving the full context of his comments (I mean, here’s the full context, but probably not what he was hoping for), but it’s his usual strategy: say something that gets him called out, claim nobody understands his genius and that his fourth-dimensional chess successfully baffled his opponents, repeat. It is, sadly, nothing new. And equally sadly, it’s something that took me a long time to realize.
It’s perhaps a little strange in this circumstance to mourn the loss of characters with whom you’ve spent a large chunk of your life. I’ll miss the more innocent times with them, and regret that wherever they go from here, it’ll likely be on a journey too distasteful to follow.
(NOTE: I’m leaving comments open, but I’ll likely have to delete abusive remarks by drive-by commentators. If you happen across any here, don’t bother responding…I’ll take care of them eventually.)
The parallel a lot of people are drawing is to Al Capp, and it will be interesting to see if the Dilbert characters vanish from popular consciousness the way the Dogpatch gang did. Probably not, given the way everything lives forever on the internet now.
The mock business book “The Dilbert Principle” was ingenious, and I think actually came up with the idea of companies promoting incompetent individuals to management so they won’t interfere with the actual productive work. (I mean, the book didn’t invent that, but it was the first to write it out as a formal observation.)
Also, maybe you don’t have to mourn the Dilbert characters? I don’t know whether the recent Scott Adams rant is revealing the noxious opinions he had all along, or if maybe the earlier version of Scott Adams didn’t actually hold those opinions, and he’s evolved in an unfortunate direction with age and wealth?
Or possibly also, we can just say sometimes creators are flawed, but we can still enjoy their work without considering it as “approval.” That’s about where I am with, say, Michael Jackson. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch anything Cosby again though.
This is definitely not ‘the earlier version of Adams didn’t hold these opinions’, just everyone finally noting that he’s saying the quiet part loud. I threw out all his books after his misogyny became too much to ignore in 2011…when he compared women to children and the mentally disabled. I wasn’t even paying attention when he claimed misandry for the 2016 election, his views on election denialism or other things. He’s been a very broken person for a very long time.
Yeah, he went fully off the “much worse than Dave Sim” deep end a long time ago, and has only gone downhill from there.
I was full-on in for Dilbert when it started, too. The strip had the good timing to arrive around the time Calvin & Hobbes ended, and if you squint you could see similarities between the Calvin/Hobbes dynamic and the Dilbert/Dogbert dynamic. Also, it was a strip that aware of and made jokes about the internet. That was cutting edge for the funny pages, especially since you considered it was still running Mary Worth.
Now I just marvel at how I guy who had one of the cushiest gigs in the world goes and loses it because he thought he had to live stream every single thought that went through his head. Going back to Calvin and Hobbes, I have no idea what Bill Watterson’s take on modern-day race relations is. And I’ll probably never know! And that’s great! As more time goes by, I admire how Watterson and Gary Larson just let their work speak for itself.
As a Morrissey fan, I sympathize.
I don’t think you’ll be missing anything, however. It’s one thing when you still enjoy the work, but the person who creates it is disappointing. But I think Dilbert from here on out is going to be bitter and awful.
It’s sad to give up on characters and/or a series. My personal example is Ellis and Shalvey’s Injection. I loved reading that book, but of course it is no more and I couldn’t buy it now even if it were being published.
I draw the line at funding awfulness. So if I find a back issue by Ellis I want to read, then I buy it because that money goes to my LCS. I won’t be buying anything new from him, though. It’s not a perfect system, I know, but it’s the protest I’m comfortable with.
As of last Wednesday, Scott Adams has a paywall for his website. As WizarDru said, and I thought it was more in the 00s, but comparing women with disabled people did it for me. If anyone had stopped reading Dilbert for even a few years around 2010 and then gone back, things were a bit different. Not often but the strip he did as mentioned above told me that once you get away with that strip, you know it was written with no concern for malice.
So now he is behind a paywall. He can create new strips however he sees fit, I guess. Or stick to the podcasts. Its bad enough that people have opinions on their now being Lego figures who have disabilities. I mentioned it to my sister and she said “Why?” She’s 60 and has known me as crippled her entire life. But I would also say that she wouldn’t care about the strip mentioned above, so maybe there were few or no complaints about him. People just stopped reading his strip, and that didn’t matter to his wallet. My two cents, a bit too long.
I know things were different in the past, but I don’t understand how anyone in 2023 thinks they can say horrible things without consequence. Even awful, unapologetic racists should realize that stating their opinions are likely to lose them some business. I guess arrogance trumps common sense.
I agree with Thom H. Whether it’s Scott Adams, Warren Ellis, J.K. Rowling or game developer Mundfish, I simply won’t support individuals and corporations that express toxic, reprehensible views. The entire “cancel culture” argument, while containing a possible small grain of truth, is most often a diversion tactic to avoid “consequence culture”. As many have already stated, we have the right to free speech but not the right to avoid the repercussion of the speech we choose.
Having said that, there is a necessary hypocrisy in taking such a stance. I’m positive I’m currently consuming pop culture that was created by individuals who hold similarly distasteful views but am just not aware of it. I suppose we do the best we can with what know at the time.
Also, big props to Mike for the stark honesty (and human perspective) on what it’s like to discover that the creator of a beloved IP, holds racist, ableist, genderist, or anti-trans views. We’ve all been there.
“2) nobody cares what a blogger thinks.”
2 it is!
“Calvin and Hobbes”
Probably THE BEST comic strip ever!
“Dogbert’s Clues for the Clueless”
Sounds like Adams should have read his OWN BOOK!
Cassandra Miller: “Yeah, he went fully off the “much worse than Dave Sim”
And Sim’s a MUCH better cartoonist!
Ian Brill: “As more time goes by, I admire how Watterson and Gary Larson just let their work speak for itself.”
Yup. They have proven their true genius through their work, and by not speaking and trying to show how smart they are.
Wayne Allen Sallee : As of last Wednesday, Scott Adams has a paywall for his website.
Does he ? I’m not noticing anything.
Or maybe it’s just such an incompetent one that my adblocker goes straight past it.
The comparison of Adams with Dave Sim made me chuckle by conjuring the image of Dilbert strips with backgrounds by Gerhard.
Ian–with regards to not knowing what Bill Watterson’s take on things is these days, I suspect we’ll get a taste of that when his new book comes out in the fall. I know more than a few people (myself included) who are both excited to get anything new from him and concerned that there will be… unpleasant surprises :/
JD: a paywall might have been changed, he did it the day after he was dropped. I thought perhaps he’d take anything from Dilbert that hasn’t been in strip form yet and put them behind the paywall. I know a few local guys in comics who thought that made him look more guilty. Maybe he just did it briefly to stop emails.
He was on Newsnation last night with Chris Cuomo so if he’s taking on cable, that might be a stickler. But it was a paywall last Wednesday. I didn’t bother looking again, because it would make me keep seeing his work.
It’s so great to see everyone has the correct opinions about everything.
In these times of compassion, conformity’s in fashion!
Sometimes a user name is its own rebuttal.
“I agree with Thom H. Whether it’s Scott Adams, Warren Ellis, J.K. Rowling or game developer Mundfish, I simply won’t support individuals and corporations that express toxic, reprehensible views. The entire ‘cancel culture’ argument, while containing a possible small grain of truth, is most often a diversion tactic to avoid ‘consequence culture.'”
I agree with that up to a point. The missing variable, though, is clarifying what the specifically-defined consequences are for non-illegal infractions against the public good. What is the proportional punishment for the crime? Is it permanent loss of employment for every infraction? If so, that seems akin to getting life imprisonment for every legal infraction committed, regardless of severity.
(It’s at this point that I should probably state that, in regards to Scott Adams specifically, I can probably count on one hand the number of Dilbert strips that I’ve read in my lifetime, so I have no particular feelings one way or another about his creative output. And the things he said last week are odious in the extreme and indefensible.)
Existential Man mentions J.K. Rowling which, to me, has very little relevance to what Scott Adams has done. Rowling is accused of being an anti-trans bigot. But she has publicly gone on record multiple times as being a supporter of the trans movement as well as of trans people specifically. She can’t have been more unambiguous about this (I’ve put a link at the end of this comment with her actual quotes). Her crime, though, is in not following in lockstep with the dogma of a specific, vocal sector of the trans community. Saying that her life experiences as someone who was born a woman are different than those of someone who is a trans woman is not a bigoted position. It doesn’t mean she’s right, it doesn’t mean she’s wrong. It just means that she disagrees with one position in a movement that she is otherwise supportive of. She doesn’t say that her experiences are better or more valid, and that a trans woman’s experience is any less valid or legitimate. She doesn’t say that a trans woman should be treated lesser than her. She just says that they had different life experiences.
But for some people (whom I refer to as secular fundamentalists), any variance from the dogma is heretical. And to me, that’s not right. People should be able to be supportive others (individuals, groups, or movements) without feeling bullied into agreeing with every single position of the individuals, groups, or movements (and then suffering public reprisals when they do disagree).
And that, to me, is the inherent danger of cancel culture, where people like Adams (who call for social and economic harm to be done against a group) are grouped together with Rowling (who simply disagrees with one point in a movement that she otherwise supports) as Existential Man has done. Another example would be people who reflexively group Woody Allen (who was independently found by two separate state agencies (NY and CT) to not have done the things he was accused of (but, notably, never charged with)) together with Roman Polanski and Harvey Weinstein (who were not only accused, charged, and tried of sex crimes, but also convicted). By any rational measure, the two are not equal, but to cancel culture they are.
And I think that this is why an increasing number of people on the political center-left are becoming more vocal about speaking out against cancel culture. Not because they sympathize or agree with someone like Scott Adams, but because they know that the real goal of cancel culture isn’t to “cancel” celebrities like Adams (who, like most canceled celebrities, likely has enough wealth to live comfortably even if he never works again), but to intimidate the rest of the population into lockstep conformity with the fundamentalist dogma out of fear of reprisal. And, just like religious fundamentalism, each secular fundamentalist is allowed to determine what is canon and what is dogma, and therefore mete out punishment (of whatever severity they personally deem appropriate) for any deviation as they see fit.
That doesn’t mean that people can’t use the power of the purse to support those whom they agree with, or to withhold financial support of those with whom they disagree. It’s your money so spend it or don’t spend it as you like. There are a number of groups or companies whom I personally do not support with my dollars (the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, the state of Florida), but I don’t try to rally others to inflict reprisal as well.
The problem is when that becomes a coordinated attempt to permanently ruin another person’s reputation or employment prospects. Again, back to my first point: What are the specifically-defined punishments for non-illegal infractions against the public good? As long as these continue to go undefined, and mob rule is allowed to reign, more and more people who are otherwise sympathetic to and aligned with various left-leaning cultural issues are going to start turning against them. I’ve seen it happen in my own cohort of middle-aged center-leftists. And I think it’s one of the reasons why the Democrats, who by any rational measure should have walloped the Republicans in the 2018 and 2020 elections, only barely squeaked by. Because a lot of people in the political middle or center-left are genuinely afraid of the rise of secular fundamentalism.
(For Rowling’s actual quotes, this article seems to capture them pretty fully and accurately: https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy )
And where, I ask you, does this leave Savage Dragonbert and Hitler’s Brainbert?
“Savage Dragonbert and Hitler’s Brainbert”
Limbo!
“I think that this is why an increasing number of people on the political center-left are becoming more vocal about speaking out against cancel culture. Not because they sympathize or agree with someone like Scott Adams, but because they know that the real goal of cancel culture isn’t to ‘cancel’ celebrities like Adams (who, like most canceled celebrities, likely has enough wealth to live comfortably even if he never works again), but to intimidate the rest of the population into lockstep conformity with the fundamentalist dogma out of fear of reprisal.”
Why are you wasting your mind-reading powers to discover the “real goal” of cancel culture when you could be using them to fight crime?
— MrJM
[…] or even a new one, who participates in good faith, you’re good. Just don’t be like this guy, who is the person in […]
Re. Daniel:
Hear, hear!
Daniel – while I appreciate you debating civilly, I have to disagree with the characterization of JKR here. Some of her words may have the veneer of “support” for trans people, but her continued behavior does not. It doesn’t take much to turn up her retweeting something vile or making statements that single out trans people for criticism (a specific strategy designed for dehumanization).
Maybe she didn’t commit a outright crime or anything, but I don’t want anything to do with her or her products. This isn’t me jumping on the “cancel culture” train — I’ve seen her, now I don’t to support her. Exactly the same as with Adams.