Dilbert 2.0: The Boom Years Page 4
This is the first strip with Alice trying to control her Fist of Death. Later it became her trademark.
If you think the reference to a crack has an intentional double meaning, you might be right. I’m not saying.
Amazingly, this comic comes directly from real life. (Friday plus Monday equals 40 percent of the workweek, so you’d expect that much absence.)
The strip above is a bit dated, but at the time it was one of the most popular strips I had drawn.
Normally, butt cracks are not allowed in comics. For some reason, I got away with this one, probably because the actual crack part is small.
This strip became an instant favorite with readers. People like it when Dogbert is dismissive of others.
I did this comic in 1996, but it remains one of the most requested themes, presumably for people who didn’t read this version.
Bicyclists were not amused by this comic.
I started putting balloons around more of the dialogue, thinking it was an improvement. In the end, it was just extra work.
How did I get away with this one?
So many people were getting in trouble for posting Dilbert comics at work that I figured it was time to revisit this theme.
For April Fool’s Day, a number of cartoonists switched comics. Mine was drawn by Bil Keane who created The Family Circus. It seemed ironic at the time, sinceDilbert was about the edgiest comic in papers.
Bil gave me the best advice I ever got in cartooning, although it took me some time to realize it. Early in my career, at a meeting of newspaper editors, where both of us were presenting, he told me my comics were “cartoonist cartoons,” by which he meant they would appeal mostly to other cartoonists, and not to the general public. At first I felt insulted. Later I realized I really did work for the public, and their preferences didn’t match mine as closely as I would have liked. That simple realization is what allowed me to change the strip to a workplace theme and trust the readers to know what they wanted.
You can say what you want about The Family Circus , but Bil is a genius, and he knows his audience.
This is the most widely reader-altered Dilbert comic ever. People in various companies and professions change Dilmom’s last line to say something along the lines of “So, you must work at [my company].” Hundreds of people have e-mailed to ask for copies of “the comic that mentions my company.” Sadly, it only exists illegally.
Many people wrote to say Einstein was a pacifist.
This comic didn’t run in its original form. The word “orgy” was considered inappropriate for the funny pages.
So I changed the last panel to replace “orgy” with the “o-word.” That version ran in papers. A surprising number of people wrote to ask what the o-word was.
When I started this comic, I wanted Dilbert to be busy with something, but I didn’t care what it was. By the third panel, the irrelevant thing in Dilbert’s hands became the joke, along with Dogbert’s response. My writing method generates a lot of apparent randomness.
Mother Teresa passed away a week before this comic ran. I got a lot of angry mail from people who thought I was insensitive because of the timing. I had submitted this comic two months earlier, and had forgotten it was in the pipeline. In retrospect, it was insensitive no matter what the timing was, because some readers can be expected to conflate fiction and reality.
The sports memorabilia industry was not amused by this series
For Jack Cassady
Thank you for the advice.
DILBERT® is a registered trademark of Scott Adams, Inc.
Licensed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
DOGBERT® and DILBERT® appear in the comic strip DILBERT®, distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc., and owned by Scott Adams, Inc.
Licensed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
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