Dilbert

• 1. Introduction

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  Dilbert first appeared in newspapers on the 16th of April 1989, written and drawn by Scott Adams. By 2013 the strip ran daily in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries and 25 languages. It follows an engineer who works in a micromanaged white-collar office, and it made that office the butt of every joke. Readers around the world seemed to recognize their own workplaces in it. How did a comic about cubicles and clueless managers travel so far? Who filled that office, and where did the characters come from? And why did a strip with such a reach end up losing its place in so many papers?

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• 2. From Home to Office

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  Early Dilbert strips took place at home, where the title character lived with his pet dog Dogbert. Plots in those years leaned on Dilbert's engineering mind, his bizarre inventions and his megalomaniacal ambitions. Later the setting moved to his workplace, and the jokes turned to technology, company problems and the daily absurdities of the job. Adams said that this change was "when the strip really started to take off." The company sits in Silicon Valley.

  The corporate world in the strip is Kafkaesque. Bureaucracy exists for its own sake, office politics get in the way of productivity, and skill and effort go unrewarded. Busy work, meanwhile, collects the praise. Much of the humor comes from characters making ridiculous decisions in response to bad management. The strip's popularity is credited to this setting, which a large and appreciative audience knew well.

  Doonesbury often appears in the editorial section because of its pointed commentary, and Dilbert found a similar odd home. Many newspapers ran it in their business section instead of with the regular comics.

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• 3. The Cast

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  Until the 13th of October 2014, Dilbert usually wore a white dress shirt, black trousers and a red-and-black striped tie that inexplicably curved upward. After that date he switched to a red polo shirt with a name badge on a lanyard. He is a skilled engineer whose social and romantic lives are poor.

  The Pointy-Haired Boss, known by those words or the initials PHB, never received a real name. Adams left him unnamed so that readers could picture their own manager. In early strips he was a balding, jowly, late-middle-aged man, and the signature pointy hair arrived later as the jowls disappeared. Adams said the hair is meant to recall devil horns.

  The boss is hopeless at management. He covers his ignorance of technical issues with buzzwords he does not understand, and he leans on group therapy sessions and business strategies that rarely work. Adams wrote that "he's not sadistic, just uncaring."

  Dogbert, billed as the smartest dog on Earth, plans to conquer the world. Afterward he would enslave everyone outside Dogbert's New Ruling Class, his elite group of followers. He once succeeded, grew bored with the peace and quit. He often works as a high-ranking consultant or in technical support, where he fools the management and scams dull customers. Still, he has pulled Dilbert out of some tight jams.

  Catbert, the evil director of human resources, was meant to appear only once. Readers responded so well that Adams brought him back for good. Dogbert hired him, wanting an HR director who looked cute while secretly downsizing employees.

  Asok is a young intern who graduated from the Indian Institutes of Technology. A perfect 1600 on the old SAT and an IQ of 240 make him the smartest member of the engineering team. Even so, the boss gives him odd jobs and his ideas in meetings are left hanging. On the 7th of February 2014 the strip made him officially gay, marking an Indian Supreme Court decision to uphold a British-era anti-gay law. That decision was overturned on the 6th of September 2018.

  Carol, the boss's long-suffering secretary, prefers the title Executive Assistant. She once told Dilbert that time with her husband and two children is like fighting porcupines in a salt mine. The CEO is bald, with an extremely tall, pointed head, and is only slightly less clueless than the boss. Tina the Tech Writer has a milder personality than Alice and often gets taken advantage of. Ratbert, an escaped lab rat living in Dilbert's house, began as part of a series of strips about a scientist's cruel experiments.

  Dave joined the strip in 2022 as its first Black character, though he identifies as white and so scrambles the company's ESG and diversity scores. It is unclear whether he is serious. At least one newspaper chain decided not to run the strips featuring him.

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• 4. Borrowed From Life

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  Wally began as a worker trying to get fired so he could collect a large severance package. Adams drew that spirit from a coworker at Pacific Bell who wanted a generous buy-out offered to the company's worst employees. To qualify, the man worked hard at being incompetent, rude and bad at his job. Adams calls him "one of the more brilliant people I've met."

  On the page, Wally hates work and sips coffee calmly while chaos erupts around him. He uses the company's dysfunction to hide and even justify his laziness. Dilbert, Ted, Alice and Asok accept him into their clique anyway, and Asok treats him as a guru of counterintuitive wisdom.

  Alice, one of the most competent and highest paid engineers, was modeled on a woman named Anita who worked with Adams. He described her as sharing Alice's "pink suit, fluffy hair, technical proficiency, coffee obsession, and take-no-crap attitude." Alice believes she is denied recognition because she is female. Her quick temper sometimes unleashes her "Fist of Death," even on the boss.

  Ted, an engineer often seen with Wally, started as a convenience. Adams calls him Ted the Generic Guy, because whenever a character needed to be fired or killed, Ted got the job. He has been pushed down a flight of stairs and returned possessed, and a new Ted is apparently hired each time. Slowly he grew into a character of his own, with a wife and children mentioned repeatedly.

  A strip dated the 2nd of April 1990 introduced the "Tiny East European country of Elbonia." Adams used it when he wanted to involve a foreign country without hurting overseas sales. He insisted it has no specific model, and that it stands for "the view that Americans have of any country that doesn't have cable television." The whole country is covered in mud, its men and women all wear full beards, and its national bird is the Frisbee.

  Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light and Supreme Ruler of Heck, is the boss's demon brother. His job is to punish minor sins, such as using a cell phone in the bathroom or stealing office supplies. His feared "Pitch-Spoon" sends offenders to be darned to Heck. One strip noted that Heck is not as bad as a cubicle.

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• 5. Praise and Pushback

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  Fortune magazine put the Dilbert character on its cover several times, and many other business publications used him too. The honors came quickly. Adams was named best international comic strip artist of 1995 in the Adamson Awards of the Swedish Academy of Comic Art. In 1997 he received the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award and the Newspaper Comic Strip Award, and the Harvey Awards named Dilbert the best syndicated strip. The Max & Moritz Prize followed in 1998.

  Media analyst Norman Solomon and cartoonist Tom Tomorrow saw a trap in all this. They argued that the strip seems to sympathize with white-collar workers but ultimately plays into the hands of upper management. Solomon pointed out that nobody in the strip rises above middle management, and that the characters grumble about managers without ever openly challenging them.

  Solomon's main evidence was Xerox, which used Dilbert strips and characters in pamphlets handed out inside the company. In his words, "Dilbert is an offbeat sugary substance that helps the corporate medicine go down." Adams replied in the strip of the 2nd of February 1998 and in his book The Joy of Work, with a sarcastic restatement of the charge.

  In 1997, Tom Vanderbilt made a similar case in The Baffler magazine. "Labor unions haven't adopted Dilbert characters as insignia," he wrote, while corporations rushed to link themselves with the strip.

  Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, attacked from the drawing board in 1998. He called the strip crudely drawn and its humor simplistic, and he wrote that "Simplicity, even crudity, rules." Adams answered with two strips titled Pippy the Ziphead. In them Dogbert creates a comic crammed with artwork so no one will notice it has only one joke.

  Griffith struck back in September of that year with his own Pippy the Ziphead, drawn in a stiff, Dilbert-like style and set in an office. His characters Griffy and Zippy trade a final line: "Yes. It was. My one joke. Ha."

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• 6. Beyond the Panel

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  In 1995 Dilbert became the first syndicated comic strip published free on the Internet. Adams put his email address in every strip, which gave him what he called a "direct channel to his customers" and let him adjust the strip to their feedback. Joe Zabel credits Dilbert with a large influence on later webcomics and on the "nerdcore" genre. In April 2008, United Media added a feature to Dilbert.com that let fans write speech bubbles. Adams welcomed it, saying, "This makes cartooning a competitive sport."

  Readers also supplied vocabulary. Adams invited them to coin words for their own offices, and one result was induhvidual, a deliberate misspelling of individual built on the slang "duh!" It insults anyone outside Dogbert's New Ruling Class, and Dilbert Newsletter #6 explains its coining. The strip also popularized cow-orker and PHB.

  In October 2007 the Catfish Bend Casino in Burlington, Iowa told its staff it would soon close. David Steward, an employee of seven years, pinned the Dilbert strip of the 26th of October 2007 to a bulletin board. It compared management decisions to those of "drunken lemurs." The casino called this very offensive, identified him on surveillance tape and fired him. It then tried to block his unemployment benefits. An administrative law judge ruled in December 2007 that he would receive them, calling his act justified protest. Adams said it might be the first confirmed case of someone fired for posting a Dilbert cartoon. On the 20th of February 2008, a strip showed Wally caught posting the same joke, and Adams advised fans to "stick to posting Garfield strips, as no one gets fired for that."

  Adams also stepped into the role of his own targets. In 1997 he posed as a management consultant named Ray Mebert to executives at Logitech, with the cooperation of the company's vice-chairman. He acted as arrogantly as consultants do in the strip, even comparing mission statements to broccoli soup. The executives swapped a plain mission statement for their New Ventures Group, about profitable growth, for a long, jargon-packed one about scouting opportunities in "emerging, mission-inclusive markets."

  In 2001 Adams worked with the design company IDEO on the "perfect cubicle," since so many strips mock the standard cubicle. A 2004 project produced designs for Dilbert's Ultimate House, abbreviated DUH, an energy-efficient building meant to prevent the small annoyances of a normal home. It includes a large, unobtrusive closet beside the living room where a Christmas tree can be stored from one year to the next.

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• 7. Books and Screens

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  The first book collection, Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons, gathered strips from the 16th of April 1989 to the 21st of October 1989. It came out in October 1992 at 112 pages. Business books followed, including The Dilbert Principle, The Dilbert Future and The Joy of Work. The last two are among the series' best sellers, and Slapped Together bound the first three into one volume. Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert, published in 2008, runs to 576 pages with about 6,500 strips and Adams's notes.

  Merchandise ranged widely. The Dilberito was a microwave burrito sold in the early 2000s in four flavors, one of them Indian with mango chutney. In 1998 Ben & Jerry's released a limited flavor called Totally Nuts. A line of mints carried puns such as Accomplish-mints and Postpone-mints. Richard Garfield designed the 1997 card game Corporate Shuffle, and a 2006 board game from Hyperion Games was named to the Games magazine Top 100. A PC game, Dilbert's Desktop Games, arrived in 1997.

  A live-action pilot, written and directed by Adams, was produced for UPN in 1997 but never aired. It starred an actor Adams described as "fit for a starring role in a romantic film," plus an animatronic Dogbert. The Library of Congress holds a copy.

  An animated UPN series ran for two seasons, from the 25th of January 1999 to the 25th of July 2000. Daniel Stern voiced Dilbert, Chris Elliott voiced Dogbert and Kathy Griffin voiced Alice. The first season followed the creation of a product called the Gruntmaster 6000, and it won an Emmy Award. The second season dropped the serial format for standalone episodes, including "The Shroud of Wally" and "The Trial." Its two-part finale ended with Dilbert, pregnant by a long list of unlikely parents, in a custody battle before Stone Cold Steve Austin as the judge.

  When UPN declined a third season, Adams said, "I lost my TV show for being white when UPN decided it would focus on an African-American audience." A DVD set, Dilbert: The Complete Series, holds thirty episodes.

  On the 7th of April 2008, Dilbert.com began posting animated web shorts of about 30 seconds each, every weekday. RingTales produced them, Powerhouse Animation Studios animated them, and radio personality Dan Roberts voiced Dilbert.

  A film never made it. Adams and United Media were struggling to launch one as early as 2006, and Chris Columbus was in talks to direct in 2007. In May 2010 Ken Kwapis was announced as director. In a December 2017 interview with The Mercury News, Adams said making it had become impossible after his public support of Donald Trump.

  A spinoff called Plop: The Hairless Elbonian published twenty-eight comics online in 2001. Its hero was unusual in Elbonia for being bald. After 9/11, Adams doubted a comic about "people who look like the Taliban" and shelved it. Later he noted fewer complaints about the designs than he expected, so the series might still appear.

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• 8. Dropped From the Papers

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  On the 3rd of June 2010, United Media sold its licensing arm, along with the rights to Dilbert, to Iconix Brand Group. That pushed the strip out of the company that had syndicated it since 1989. Dilbert then moved to Universal Uclick, part of Andrews McMeel Universal, beginning in June 2011, and stayed there until 2023.

  On the 29th of February 2016, Adams announced a six-week vacation on his blog. He still wrote the strips, but guest artists from Universal Uclick drew them. CNN anchor Jake Tapper drew the week of the 23rd of May and returned for one in September 2019.

  In September 2022, Lee Enterprises stopped running the strip in what Adams said were 77 newspapers, when it launched a new comics page without it. Adams had received complaints about strips mocking the environmental, social and corporate governance movement, but he was unsure that was the reason. The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst Media, dropped Dilbert in October 2022 after strips joked that underperforming office workers could claim reparations for slavery.

  The larger break came after a YouTube video that Adams published on the 22nd of February 2023. It responded to a Rasmussen Reports poll asking about the statement "It's okay to be White," a slogan associated with white supremacy. The poll found that 53% of African Americans agreed, 26% disagreed and 21% were not sure. Citing it, Adams called Black Americans a "hate group" and said white people should "get the hell away from" them. Sources such as The Economist and Reuters described the video as racist. Adams stated that he disavowed racism.

  Hundreds of newspapers dropped the strip. Andrews McMeel Syndication ended its distribution and removed it from GoComics, which it owns. Gannett papers, including the Detroit Free Press, The Indianapolis Star, The Cincinnati Enquirer and The Arizona Republic, also dropped it. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Seattle Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Plain Dealer stopped running it and published editorials denouncing Adams. The Los Angeles Times added that it had already removed four Dilbert cartoons in the preceding nine months for failing its standards.

  Adams answered by announcing that on the 16th of March 2023 he would launch Dilbert Reborn on the subscription website Locals, calling it "spicier than the original." He died in January 2026 from prostate cancer, at the age of 68.

  The publisher's book series stopped before the break. Its last collection, Not Remotely Working, ends on the 17th of October 2021, and Andrews McMeel will not publish the strips from the 18th of October 2021 through the 12th of March 2023.

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