CC: Keeping fresh after all these years ... how
do you do it? (I guess it’s bad news that there’s
still plenty of workplace fodder today.)
SA: I have a seemingly endless stream of
suggestions coming in by e-mail. The hard
part is finding suggestions that weren’t
inspired by a past Dilbert strip. The second
problem is remembering what I have already
done. Just yesterday I looked at my morn-
ing’s work and wondered if I had done the
same strip word for word or if it was just
déjà vu. A reader will tell me if it’s a duplicate.
Staying fresh does get harder every year.
How Dilbert came to be
CC: When is Dilbert going to get a BlackBerry?
A Facebook site? Start a blog? If he were to
IM [instant message] at work, who would it
be with?
SA: It’s tough to incorporate in the strip
anything that is tiny or exists on a computer
screen. But I have had Dilbert using
BlackBerry-like devices during meetings. I
will probably incorporate something like
Facebook, by a generic name, at some point.
Same thing with IM.
IRIDIO PHOTOGRAPHY
CC: It’s good to know that
he’s keeping up with the
times. But that brings up
this question: What will
happen when Dilbert
approaches retirement?
Or maybe we won’t have
to worry about that for
a while. After all,
65 isn’t what it
used to be.
SA: My plan
is for immor-
tality. I figure
science is only
about 20 years
away from making
that happen, and I
can hang on that
long. And I will need
something to do for
eternity. That means
Dilbert will evolve
wings and gills be-
fore he retires. C
Scott Adams started drawing—and
dreaming up zany cartoon characters—
as a young boy.
GROWING UP in Windham, New York, Scott
Adams wanted to be Charles Schulz. An
uncle who owned a farm had a collection of
Peanuts books, and whenever young
Adams would visit he went straight to the
cartoons. “I became obsessed with them,
even before I could read or understand
them,” Adams explains in the introduction
of Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert.
Like a youngster emulating his favorite
baseball player, Adams drew Peanuts-like
cartoons. His first featured creatures called
“Little Grabbers,” which was what his
father called kids. The Little Grabbers were
depicted doing various acts of mischief
around the house, much to the chagrin of
the parents.
COURTESY OF © SCOT T ADAMS, INC./DIST. BY UFS, INC.
But the path to becoming a successful
cartoonist turned out to be anything but
straight. Adams attended a small college in
New York, migrated west to escape the
snow, went to work at a white-collar job,
earned an MBA at the University of California at Berkeley and was on a trajectory
toward a career in business management.
Occasional attempts at selling cartoons on
the side were politely but firmly rejected.
His creative options were reduced to
drawing comics, complete with witty captions about workplace happenings, on the
whiteboard in his cubicle at Pacific Bell, a
Bay Area phone company. The first characters became rough precursors to Dilbert
and Dogbert. They were popular among
his co-workers—who undoubtedly enjoyed
the commentaries on management and
life among the foot soldiers—but had no
commercial value.
That is, until Adams received a call in
1988 from United Media, the parent company
of United Feature Syndicate. Adams had sent
The new
Dilbert book
comes with
a DVD of
Dilbert
cartoons.
© SCOTT ADAMS, INC./DIST. BY UFS, INC.
The Costco Connection
Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert, by Scott
Adams (Andrews McMeel Publishing),
will be available in Costco warehouses
and online at costco.com at the end of
October. The book features a collection
of 2,000 Dilbert cartoons, annotated
with Adams’ commentary. Also included
is a DVD with every cartoon from 1989
through April 2008.
the agency a submission featuring Dilbert,
but assumed it had been thrown in the trash
with all the others. United Media offered
Adams a contract to develop Dilbert, a no-obligation testing period of sorts that could
lead to syndication.
Adams passed the test, and Dilbert
quietly debuted in April 1989 in a few dozen
small newspapers. Growth was slow but
steady, enough so that Dilbert reached 800
newspapers by 1995 and Adams was able
to quit his day job at Pacific Bell (though he
confesses he might have been fired for
spending too much time drawing). Today,
Dilbert appears in 2,000 newspapers in 70
countries and is enjoyed by some 150 million
fans worldwide each day. Dilbert is also
featured in several books, including The
Dilbert Principle and Dogbert’s Top Secret
Management Handbook, both of which
became New York Times bestsellers, and in
dozens of collections and calendars.
In Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert, Adams,
51, includes an amusing and heartwarming
collection of early drawings (saved by his
mom), his first submissions to drawing contests, letters from supporters, rejection
notices and personal reflections that show
how a child with a dream came to be the
artist behind a painfully funny cartoon.—TT
