'Dilbert': How Scott Adams's comic changed from satirizing office frustrations to being boxed by its creator
Before there was 'The Office', there was 'Dilbert', a newspaper comic strip that came to national recognition and became insanely popular in the '90s. 'Dilbert' was written and illustrated by Scott Adams, and first published on April 16, 1989. The comic gave a satirical treatment to the everyday work-life of a white-collar employee in a large corporation. Adams created Dilbert as a composite of his coworkers from his time working in a number of jobs involving technology and finances, for Pacific Bell, California between 1986 and 1995. Dilbert, an engineer working in a micromanaged office, first appeared in Adams's business presentations and slowly made his way into daily publications, eventually becoming a household name and beloved comic character.
Dilbert, a computer programmer and engineer for a high-tech company without an apparent aim, was bombarded daily by nonsensical projects and business decisions of his incompetent boss and the company's similarly ham-fisted management. While he is at their mercy, he can only lament and vent his frustrations out to his coworkers, Wally, a middle-aged balding man always looking for an excuse to slack off and Alice, who's continuous frustrations with her job end up with frequent outbursts of rage. The smartest person in the office may be Asok, a young intern characterized by his naivete, who's capabilities go completely unrecognized by the management.
Dilbert went on to become a cultural yardstick and struck a chord with the white-collar workers in the real world whose daily frustrations had become a basis for the comic series. In the comic strip, the corporate culture is portrayed as a Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy distinguished by office politics hindering productivity, where employee effort is underappreciated. Adams’s Dilbert empire was built in the late ’80s after long-running staples such as Dennis the Menace, Family Circus and Blondie no longer appealed to the audience and Adams’s creation was considered as fresh
Dilbert is your typical clerical worker, easily recognizable with his white dress shirt, slacks, and perpetually curled red tie gets through the indignities of his existence with help from his pet, Dogbert, who himself is a megalomaniac with a self-profiting agenda. Adams's comics were picked up by United Features Syndicate in 1989, which propelled his illustrative career, whilst he was still working his day job.
Originally, the script for the comic focused on Dilbert and Dogbert engaged in conversation at him, but the readers' feedback on the office-based episode prompted Adams to shift the setting. Many of the early plots also featured Dilbert as an engineer making his bizarre inventions and Dogbert's egotistical ambitions. With the shift in setting, the comic started to satirize Dilbert's office environment coupled with technology and company issues. His workplace is located in Silicon Valley and Adams said he decided to make the switch in setting "when the strip really started to take off". The humor within the series stems from characters making blatantly ridiculous decisions that are an evident cause for mismanagement. All of this and more shot Dilbert and its creator to fame and it eventually went on to become a short-lived television adaptation in 1999.
Adams became the recipient of the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award and the Newspaper Comic Strip Award in 1997 for his work. 'Dilbert' now has an online presence, along with appearances in 2,000 newspapers worldwide in at least 70 countries and 25 languages. In 1997, Dilbert became the first fictional character to make the Time magazine list for the most influential Americans. Dilbert has also frequently appeared on the cover of Fortune Magazine.
When the comic's creator, Adams, began expressing his support for Donald Trump, it surprised a lot of his fandom, who’d always considered him to be liberal on social issues. Through the years, his support has only grown stronger and in the current troubled atmosphere, on June 29, 2020, Adams took to his Twitter claiming that the show based on his comic strip was canceled because of reverse racism. He initially lost his job because he was white and later revealed that it was his decision to leave. “I lost my TV show for being white when UPN decided it would focus on an African-American audience. That was the third job I lost for being white. The other two in corporate America. (They told me directly.)" he said in a tweet. Following up on that, he clarified, "I wasn't fired. I was told I couldn't be promoted because of my color and gender, so I left, of course. I invite anyone who had the same experience in corporate America to say so in the comments. Red Pill coming. Open wide." However, he had previously also blamed the show's cancellation on its low ratings and time slot changes. While the show was discontinued, the comic series remained active. However, now social media is calling for canceling his creation 'Dilbert' as well because of its creator's political views.