…oh my.
I couldn’t tell you the first time I read a Dilbert comic strip. I can tell you that I quickly grew to love them back then, likely in the 1990’s or early 2000’s and before the internet swallowed up any need for me to still purchase newspapers.
I probably have a collection book or two somewhere of Dilbert strips. I liked the characters. I enjoyed the witty and bewildering look at being an office drone. Writing such humorous things takes quite a bit of skill and making it look “easy” takes even more. Having enough material to continue doing the strip for some 30 years? That takes genius.
But it doesn’t mean one is smart.
Back in the 1940’s and through 1977, Al Capp was renowned for his Li’l Abner comic strip…
Though known to espouse certain liberal causes, Mr. Capp would, by the late 60’s and into the 1970’s, become very conservative in his ideologies. He would end his career in controversy, accused by multiple women of sexual harassment, including a 19 year old Goldie Hawn.
And so we have Scott Adams who, with the rise of Donald Trump years ago, started to espouse a sharp right wing philosophy as well. There’s nothing wrong with espousing certain right wing ideologies, I feel, but there does come a point where they can slip a person into unforgivable areas.
Don’t take my word for it. You can go to YouTube.com and see the entirety of Mr. Adams’ video (it runs nearly an hour long) but here you get a smaller length clip that explores what has exactly happened since the video, and shows what got him into hot water to begin with…
The bottom line is that newspapers no longer want to carry Mr. Adams’ Dilbert and… I can’t blame them. I don’t know what goes through the mind of some creators. As I mentioned, Al Capp had his issues… and they may well have been even worse than those in which Mr. Adams currently falls into.
I’m familiar with and could mention other creators who have also espoused strange, perhaps even bizarre ideals and philosophies. The difference seems to be that today these things can be recorded, whether by others or by the person themselves, and posted with seemingly no awareness of how bad saying certain things may make them look.
Mr. Adams, if he was smart, has a nice nest egg thanks to his Dilbert strip. Based on the reactions thus far, he may need it because his strip may not exist for too much longer.
And, ultimately, he will have no one to blame for his misfortunes but himself.