Dilbert 2.0: The Boom Years Page 3

  In the past several years, which might someday be remembered as the Outsourcing Era, employee attitudes reverted to healthy levels of pessimism. Suddenly it became much easier to write Dilbert, thanks to a steady stream of new employee complaints.

  Best of all, I got married to my wonderful wife Shelly, and she has embarked on a mission to show me how to work less and enjoy life more. I hope she knows what she’s getting herself into.

  That brings us to now, and this twentieth-anniversary book. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

  —Scott Adams, 2008

  This was the sort of joke I wondered if I alone would appreciate. It wasn’t a huge hit, but a small portion of readers thought it was wonderfully random. Others wondered who Beverly was or what it meant. It was nothing but a name that seemed funny when I thought of it.

  While lacking in cleverness or subtlety, workplace themes that hammer some pet peeve or another, such as this one about travel budgets getting trimmed, find the biggest audience. These are the ones people cut out and pass around, because they put words and pictures to what people are thinking.

  I discovered it’s often funny to have characters voice inner thoughts.

  The person who talks too much is a theme I have hit over and over. It’s one of my biggest complaints in life. Ironically, by doing this gag so often, in various forms, I have become the thing I loathe.

  Sometimes it is hard to find the comic exaggeration in a situation. The only way Dogbert could come up with an investment fund that is more of a scam than the ones on the market is to work reincarnation into the mix.

  For newspapers, this comic was edited from “Cubicle Gestapo” to “Cubicle Police.” The thinking was that any Nazi reference would get people all wound up. At the time, I thought that was a ridiculous decision. Eventually, I learned it was a wise decision. The change didn’t hurt the joke, and lots of people do complain about any reference to Nazis.

  I enjoyed writing dating jokes for Dilbert, and did a lot of them in the early days, but they never found the audience I hoped for.

  I thought the middle panel above would make a best-selling T-shirt. We tried. It wasn’t.

  This series with Dogbert as the patron saint of technology was hugely popular. It became the theme for T-shirts, greeting cards, and mugs.

  Alice’s personality is starting to be defined by her grumpiness. She hasn’t yet developed the Fist of Death.

  At this time I started having trouble with my drawing hand from overuse. The lettering is different because I hired another artist to ink over my penciled text. I still did all of the artwork and writing.

  I always wonder to what degree the readers who have no corporate experience think the situations in Dilbert are fantasy. This comic was based on an actual strategy I saw succeed at my day job.

  Most old sayings aren’t as wise as they sound.

  I didn’t invent Buzzword Bingo, but this strip did a lot to popularize it. The idea for the game is often incorrectly attributed to me.

  This comic was based on a mistake I made when my boss asked me to attend a meeting in his place and defend the budget for my project. The meeting leader asked what the downside of slashing my budget would be, and I answered honestly that it wouldn’t make much difference because my project wasn’t terribly important. My boss informed me later that that was the wrong answer. My project didn’t get funded, but I also never had to go to another meeting on budgets.

  At this point, Dilbert was systematically mocking all the management trends that were the subject of best-selling business books. All the trends had an element of common sense to them, but when overapplied by simple-minded managers, they usually generated more bad than good.

  As the “budget guy” in one of my many corporate jobs, people assumed I made the decisions on who got what budget. It was hard to convince managers I was only in charge of addition and subtraction. They often lobbied me to get more money.

  The era of downsizing in the ’90s is what put Dilbert on the map. The media needed a face for all the corporate incompetence and insensitivity, and Dilbert was just hitting its stride. Dilbert appeared on the covers of Newsweek, Time, Fortune , and even People.

  By this point I had learned from reader feedback that simply describing an absurd corporate situation with honesty was enough to make the comic work, at least for people who identified with the situation. The clever puns and elaborate “gags” were unnecessary, and largely abandoned going forward.

  To me, few things are funnier than subordinates making unhelpful suggestions for their own entertainment. I learned this from a co-worker named Red, who intentionally used as many buzzwords as possible in meetings while trying to keep a straight face. It was pure subversive genius.

  The boss reached his portliest dimensions at about this time, for no particular reason. I just have trouble drawing things the same way twice, so there tends to be some drift.

  Dilbert’s dating life mirrored my own experience in my twenties. These jokes were painfully easy to write. And yes, I did get turned down for a lunch date because the woman I asked out had eaten a big breakfast.

  The quote about big round numbers still pops up on the Internet on a regular basis. It has always been impossible to predict which ideas will catch the public’s imagination. This one surprised me.

  Cartoonists have a limited set of tricks. Among mine are putting tails on people and coming up with names that sound funny. Combine the two, and a guy with a tail, named Rocky, is automatically funny. At least to me.

  The character that would become Alice was getting increasingly angry, but I didn’t know she would become a regular.

  As a rule, you shouldn’t flip the perspective on a comic as I did with the first and third panels below. It confuses the reader. I did it in this case because I started the comic before knowing how it would end, and I needed Dilbert to have the last line. In those days, I drew everything with pencil, pen, and paper. So once I started a comic, I finished it any way I could. I had to get to my day job, which meant do-overs weren’t an option. Virtually every comic from 1989 to 1995 is essentially the first draft.

  One of my corporate jobs was writing business cases. This is a fancy way of saying “lying.”

  I once worked on a project where it was clear that completing the project would mean I was out of a job. I managed to stretch it until the next reorganization made it all moot. That’s called experience.

  Try to get “Thip! Crinkle! Spoit!” out of your head. It’s not so easy.

  Like Dilbert, I worry about all the wrong things. I hate having anyone waiting in line behind me for anything. It’s the main reason I don’t golf.

  Behold, Alice gets her name. And her hair is starting to form the triangle that would come to define her look.

  Alice is still married at this point.

  I was enduring a team of consultants in my day job. They didn’t have external brain packs, but they did have the attitude.

  Yes, I was in that meeting.

  Slapstick works if you can get the flying dentures to look just right.

  Most of the projects I worked on got canceled in favor of cooler sounding projects that also later got canceled.

  This is the sort of joke that has a thought-provoking core wrapped in a coating of juvenile humor. Jokes like this are a big reason I have so many readers in fifth grade who wear glasses and get excellent grades.

  Arguably, this is the point where Alice’s true personality emerges and begins to solidify. Her name will fluctuate a few times before settling in at Alice.

  I don’t know if this is the funniest comic I’ve ever written, but it might be the densest number of jokes in a three-panel strip.

  Dilbert is most popular when the workplace is at its worst. In the mid-’90s, when downsizing was the dominant trend in business, Dilberttook off. A few years later, in the dot-com era, I literally couldn’t find anyone willing to complain about his or her job. People started to think they could become Inter
net billionaires any time they wanted if they just quit their jobs and started their own companies. And since they didn’t do that, I think people convinced themselves that their jobs weren’t so bad after all. This was the toughest time for me to draw the strip.

  My snitches went dry.

  I wondered how many readers realized the real joke was in the fifth panel. The rest was filler.

  This strip features Liz, Dilbert’s only long-term (relatively) girlfriend. I got rid of her eventually, largely because people complained that she looked twelve years old the way I drew her. And also because people who related to Dilbert couldn’t relate to him as much if he were happy in love.

  A big part of cartooning is coming up with words to express sounds. The sound of an arm waving rapidly is obviously “THUPA THUPA THUPA.”

  Bad math is often considered a political opinion.

  Any reference to Star Trek or Star Wars always gets a huge reaction. I try to slip them in occasionally. I’m a pleaser.

  I was amazed the one below got published in newspapers. But I believe a few of the more conservative ones ran a repeat that day.

  I told my readers via The Dilbert Newsletter that if Dilbert ever reached the promised land with a woman, I would depict his necktie in a relaxed pose. It was strictly an inside joke for the people on my newsletter list. But I gave the situation some ambiguity with Dilbert’s Unitarian reference. Don’t make me explain it.

  Strips like this one are not clever, but they sure are popular.

  Al Gore’s staff asked for the original of this comic. It hung in the vice president’s office.

  Until I quit my day job, I couldn’t go back and rewrite strips if I decided they didn’t work after all. I simply didn’t have time. The one below is the most obvious case where I had to salvage something from nothing. I failed.

  This Bungee Boss comic became an instant classic. And another Dilbert phrase entered the workplace vocabulary.

  This is the first comic featuring the character that later became Catbert. At this point, I had no plans for keeping him beyond the week.

  The cat character had no name, but hundreds of people e-mailed me to say they “loved Catbert.” I’m no marketing genius, but when hundreds of people spontaneously give a character the same name, it’s a keeper. The problem was trying to move Catbert into the workplace so he could have more impact. One day, while taking a shower, inspiration struck. I decided to make Catbert the Evil Director of Human Resources. I figured it was a good fit because the director of HR generally doesn’t care if you live or die, and enjoys playing with you until you get downsized. That is very catlike.

  By this time, Dilbert comics were a common occurrence on cubicle walls. And management didn’t like it.

  Oops. Alice became Anne in this strip. I probably just forgot the name I used last time.

  I literally think Dogbert’s prediction will happen.

  Selfishness is a theme that always works. If you develop the characters, and have them all act selfishly, half of the writing is done.

  Dilbert started getting more of a bad attitude at this point.

  This is the first comic describing the Dilbert Principle, i.e., the most worthless employees are promoted to management where they can do the least harm.

  I performed many tasks during my days at Pacific Bell. Most of them involved pretending to work. I wasn’t a computer programmer, but to fight boredom I read computer manuals and taught myself how to code. At one point I wrote a word processing program. It took months, and had no purpose other than to entertain me. Luckily for me, writing my own programs looked like work.

  This one hung on a lot of walls in tech support departments.

  This joke is funnier if you know that the best and brightest employees don’t get assigned to this sort of task.

  I usually ate my lunch alone, primarily for this reason.

  Asok the intern hadn’t been created yet.

  The strip above is the version I originally submitted. My editor rejected it, explaining that the terrorist character would be construed by readers as Middle Eastern. This would cause complaints about my unfair stereotyping. After some negotiating, I agreed to give the terrorist a name that made it clear he was Scandinavian. Ironically, this actually improved the clarity of the joke. The version that ran in papers is below. No Scandinavians complained.

  I experimented with lettering by computer, but I didn’t have a working font. It was just cut and paste. That’s why the spacing in the lettering below is so bad.

  I was once a floor warden. It did not make me feel important.

  I was on that team.

  When the strip above was published, it wasn’t common to send e-mail to people within whispering distance. Now it seems normal.

  I don’t know how many people playfully sent copies of this comic to journalism majors, but it was a lot.

  Here’s where Catbert became a regular character, with a natural role in the office. He also got glasses.

  The strip above is the all-time most popular Dilbert comic. When I wrote it, I thought it was weak. Readers disagreed. It went on to appear on coffee mugs, mouse pads, and T-shirts. And it’s probably the most reprinted Dilbert strip.

  When the strip below was published, I was doing book signings of my own. I was amazed when people asked me to write entire paragraphs in their books, or draw them their own comic strip with them as characters, while a hundred people stood in line behind them wishing they would die.

  This comic is only funny because his name is Gustav.

  After the following comic ran, I got an e-mail from the attorney for Uncle Milton Industries, Inc., informing me that his client owned the trademark Ant Farm®. Because I used it as if it were generic, the attorney explained that I had damaged his client’s intellectual property. He demanded I run a correction in a subsequent strip.

  But I was busy. So I ignored it. A few weeks later, the attorney e-mailed again. He said he hadn’t heard back from me, and he reiterated his demand for a correction.

  But again, I was busy. I ignored it. By the time I got a third e-mail from the attorney, and I realized he was probably paid by the hour, I knew I couldn’t win. I decided to cave in, and do what probably no cartoonist has ever done: I issued a correction (next page) that ran in a subsequent strip.

  The attorney thanked me for the correction.

  The one below isn’t funny, but it was one of the most requested themes by my readers.

  This is the second time I drew Dilbert’s necktie lying flat. It was a subtle reference to Antina’s lack of appeal. A surprising number of people noticed.

  This series ran not long after I left my day job at Pacific Bell and became a full-time cartoonist. My last boss—the one who asked me to leave so he could use the budget for someone more useful—had a goatee.

  The great thing about being a cartoonist is the opportunity to get revenge without risking jail time.

  In my first draft, the brooms were inserted. That didn’t make it past the editorial filters.

  This idea eventually became the theme of my first non-Dilbert book, God’s Debris.

  The pig had no real purpose. I just thought pigs would be wandering around in Elbonia. And pigs are fun to draw. I often draw my comics before I write the dialogue, starting with a general idea and hoping something funny occurs to me. In this case, the drawing of the pig suggested the last line. That’s why it seems so random.

  The real-life inspiration for Wally, my co-worker, ran a side business out of his cubicle behind me.

  Asok the intern is introduced here. I didn’t know he would become a regular. He’s named after a friend of mine from my day job at Pacific Bell, who spelled his name that way. I didn’t know that the common spelling in India is Ashok. Many people have wondered if Asok is actually an acronym for something. I’ve heard some good scatological guesses.