Yesterday, Scott Adams the Dilbert Guy brought us some truly tragic news:
The tragedy? That the strip hasn’t been shitcanned by all the other papers that still run it.
In another tweet, Adams strongly hinted that his alleged “cancellation” was a response to recent comics he did taking aim at ESG — not the legendary Bronx-based all-female punk-funk band but rather an assortment of “woke” corporate practices designed to improve a company’s approach to “Environmental, Social, and Governance” issues. In a video last week, Adams declared that he was going to “destroy ESG.”
Also, he introduced a black character who — get this! — “identifies as white!”
Such a barrel of laughs, this guy.
Anyway, while some in the media and amongst Adams’ fans accepted the “cancellation because woke” narrative wholesale, it turns out to not be true: the “cancellation” was not so much a political statement as it was a consequence of a cost-cutting measure taken by the newspapers’ extremally, er, frugal owners, Lee Enterprises, that also took down an assortment of other comic strips, among them (deep breath) Brewster Rocket: Space Guy!, Sally Forth, Blondie, Shoe, Beetle Bailey, Snuffy Smith, Bizarro, Zits, Breaking Cat News, Judge Parker, Dennis the Menace, The Family Circus, Mr. Boffo, Baby Blues, Mutts and Ziggy.
You’ll be glad to know that Garfield survived the culling that will leave each newspaper in Lee Enterprise’s stable with the same ten comic strips. I don’t think I’ve read a Beetle Bailey in literally decades, and I’ve never heard of Breaking Cat News, but I can’t believe they’re getting rid of Mutts and Mr. Boffo, they both rock (insofar as any newspaper comic strip rocks these days).
Lee Enterprises also reportedly plans to fire about 400 employees from a number of its papers this year, because that’s just the kind of company they are.
Anyway, a bunch of people did Scott Adams one better by posting things on Twitter about Dilbert’s “cancellation” that were actually funny.
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To what pretends to be a “conservative’s” mind, every boo-boo they receive is either “God’s will or someone else’s fault.”
And if they can’t find an evil conspiracy that blames that often random, uninvolved “someone else” and are forced to put it down to “God’s will,” they (and they alone) instantly become fucking Job after he’s been covered in boils (but they are more than willing to hint that God’s made some kind of unjust mistake, in their case).
They expect to have everything and more returned sevenfold (never mind about your first round of dead kids, etc.) for bearing it all so well. Which they haven’t.
Adams is a stupid, selfish asshole, whose millions of dollars and wide (and disgusting) fame still aren’t enough. If only we made him King or something! When he isn’t busy, at least.
Tell me more about him when he’s died. Then I can forget such a creep ever polluted the earth and our culture.
Aww…did Capitalism turn out to be a fickle mistress who doesn’t love you any more?
People read comic strips in the newspaper still?
People read print newspapers still?
Damn. If his Twitter photo can be believed, Scott Adams drinks a mighty big cup of coffee. That could make a guy irritable.
Comics in the newspaper.
I’m old enough to remember that, even somewhat into this century — we had a newspaper subscription longer than anyone else I know, except my parents and their peers.
But we gave it up, I dunno… 20 years ago?
The (often small local) newspapers that are hanging on don’t have the money to carry comic strips any more. And the big newspaper strips have all been online for years.
Maybe you just aren’t very funny, Scott? It seems to be a failing of your kind.
That and many tech nerds and cubicle dwellers are working at home at least part of the time, with no pants on and a dog at their feet.
I would like to thank whoever/whatever finally got rid of Family Circus.
“Breaking Cat News” is adorable, BTW. Kitty lovers should check it out.
@ Full Metal Ox
LOL exactly.
Talk about people living in poverty, global injustice, corporate-driven climate change – “oh that’s just the mechanisms of the market, suck it up buttercup”
Your extra-special big boy comic strip gets cancelled in notoriously struggling print media outlets for cost-saving reasons – “it’s a woke conspiracy!!”
Aw, I can’t hate it after they dropped an out-of-the-blue reference to Warhammer 40K some years ago.
@GSS ex-noob; @Nequam:
Aw, I can’t hate it after they dropped an out-of-the-blue reference to Warhammer 40K some years ago.
Lynda Barry is a devoted and unironic fan; Family Circus showed her daily glimpses of what a loving and harmonious family life—something she wasn’t even remotely getting at home—could be. Jeff Keane, returning the admiration, drew a circle that took Barry in:
https://thenearsightedmonkey.tumblr.com/post/161259110639/dear-students-i-was-a-kid-growing-up-in-a
(For my own part, I find the Sunday panels mapping Billy’s wanderings a useful metaphor for my own thought processes and conversational habits; I’m recalling explaining to my sister-in-law why I’d like to see Singin’ In The Rain—a conversation that detoured into Pacific Rim, Bruce Lee’s formative education, Princess Tutu, and a Cracked video essay arguing that martial arts movies are musicals for dudes—the last in particular to set up my conclusion that dance movies are action films for nonviolent people.)
During the run of Married With Children, Al Bundy devolved from a loser to a righteous martyr, pandering to the resentments of its male viewers. In Dilbert’s devolution, the strip has dropped any jokes at the character’s expense, such as about his dating life, and instead focused almost entirely on the absurdities of corporate culture. Gone is the surreal nature of Dilbert’s life away from office – Bob the Dinosaur, Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light. Adams used to echo the original M*A*S*H book and movie in portraying the tension between power/status and competence, but now his strip is an extended rant about how he knows best how to run the world and how anyone who disagrees is a deluded fool. I don’t know what turned him into just another conservative grump demanding that white men like himself remain at the center of American life.
I lost all my faith in America when Scott Adams’s comments, politics and economic theories began popping up in financial and economic websites as they were overrun by right wing nut cases (sites like Zero Hedge and Dollar Collapse were, for many years, rational places where sane people talked about markets). What kind of a political party or ideology has a fucking cartoon writer as one of its inspirational leaders? The left doesn’t even elevate Trudeau to anywhere near where the right puts Adams and Trudeau is overtly political!
I suppose Adams can wipe his ass and his tears with the tens of millions of dollars he has made over the years. Adams became bitter and unfunny a long time ago and it was reflected in Dilbert which became sarcastic, bitter and depressing.
@Carstonio:
The sad thing is that the signs were always there. Sure, we all laughed (well, OK, mildly chuckled) at “Dogbert’s Ruling Class” and how you could become a member, as a slightly witty way of setting up a mailing list. We just didn’t get that he was actually serious.
(For the record, I never signed up. I just remember being mildly amused at it.)
As for cancelling Blondie, do you realize Blondie has been running since 1929? That’s a lot of Dagwood sandwiches.
@Nequam and @Snowberry – Yes and yes – I usually read the Montreal Gazette newspaper comics while I’m eating breakfast. I would be right now except my other (new!) computer crashed and won’t turn on and now I have to email a prof about not finishing this PowerPoint for a language class since it’s only saved on the other machine. Arrrggh.
Sorry. My mind is filled with laptop troubles. Anyway, another flaw of recent Dilbert is that it makes Dilbert (the character) always right in any argument. The character was funnier when he was allowed to make mistakes. Perhaps this is related to the one-note politics thing too.
The last time I tried to read comics in a newspaper, they had been shrunk down to half their previous size and my poor myopic eyes could not deal.
@Full Metal Ox: I had seen the Lynda Barry one too, though I was more surprised by the WH40K one because I’d actually seen it in a print paper that was lying on a table at the grocery store while I took time to enjoy my recently-purchased lunch!
I can’t remember the last time I read comics in a newspaper. I admit I used to find Dilbert amusing, decades ago. One strip I remember – it was a “take your kids to work day”, and 2 children were watching Dilbert print PowerPoint slides. The boy says to the girl, “I really don’t think it’s an evil troll.”. The girl replies “Look at those PowerPoint slides it’s making! It’s clearly not human!”
My mother still gets a physical newspaper on the weekends, but she’s 82 years old.
@The Phantom Cheese, Wearer of Problem Glasses:
As for cancelling Blondie, do you realize Blondie has been running since 1929? That’s a lot of Dagwood sandwiches.
Old enough for Blondie to have been a flapper—in fact, her maiden name was Boopadoop. (It’s long been a headcanon of mine that Blondie had a brunette sister who went into show business, under an abbreviated version of the family name.)
@FMOx: I shall adopt your Blondie head canon as my own. And yes, the fact that Blondie got axed after 90 years (!) proves that Adams isn’t as speshul as he thinks.
@Carstonio: Couldn’t agree more. The surreal out of office stuff was always the best. I loved Phil. And I remember the mud of Elbonia (which was always a bit non-PC just in premise).
As to when he turned to the Side of Insufficient Light, I’m gonna guess September 11, 2001, which is when it happened to a lot of people.
Also, this is one small chain of small newspapers; they DGAF about “woke”, they’re just trying to keep afloat. They’re not hiring AOC and funding Antifa, they’re simply trying to stay in business, bringing local news and a few comics to their subscribers. Who knows, maybe they took a reader poll on which strips to keep and which to trash (or at least made note of letters/emails they got), and Dilbert didn’t make the top 10. It’s a tough economic world out there. Dog eat dog. The financial system eats Dogbert.
Poor widdle Scotty, suffering the effects of capitalism.
Is Scotty some socialist tyrant trying to tell a business owner what he can and can’t have in his own product? That’s Communism!!1!!
The issue with Family Circus is that Bil Keane is dead, and he probably should have retired the strip at some point before that. But if you look at ones from the 1960s-80s, they were on point.
If we’re doing ‘things I liked about Dilbert’
I must confess I do use “Is it a copyright thing?” a lot.
@Alan:
Frankly, the Dilbert TV show was better than the comic even at the time it came out (which was 1999, so pre-9/11 days).
As to why, that always seemed obvious to me. The TV show format forced considerations of pacing and plot construction which weren’t required in the daily comic strip, which could (and often did) ramble on far longer than it should have on a subject and sometimes would just toss entire concepts into the waste basket when Adams got distracted by the next shiny object. Basically, the TV show required actual formal writing techniques rather than throwing out whatever seemed like a good idea at the time.
I agree wtih GSS ex-noob, Breaking Cat News is adorable.
It started as a joke by the artist about how her cats seemed to be interviewing her when she had something like food around that they were very interested in, and it blossomed into an ongoing strip, Recommended to catlovers.
This reminds me of when Tim Allen complained about his TV show being cancelled by the network because he’s a conservative instead of it being because, you know, TV shows get cancelled every year and ratings don’t always factor into it (a big thing in the past few years has been networks cancelling series that they don’t produce themselves, even if they are still doing decent numbers).
So I guess being a conservative means you should have immunity from any regular consequences of being in whatever industry you’re part of?
Also, fuck Tim Allen who compared being a Republican in Hollywood to being in 1930s Germany.