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| Title | Dilbert |
|---|---|
| Creator | Scott Adams |
| Status | Running |
| Syndicate | United Feature Syndicate |
| Publisher | Andrews McMeel Publishing |
| Comictype | |
| Genre | Humor |
| First | April 16, 1989 |
Dilbert (first published April 16, 1989) is an American comic strip written and drawn by Scott Adams. Dilbert is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office featuring the engineer Dilbert as the title character. The strip has spawned several books, an animated television series, a computer game, and hundreds of Dilbert-themed merchandise items. Adams has also received the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award and Newspaper Comic Strip Award in 1997 for his work on the strip. Dilbert appears in 2000 newspapers worldwide in 65 countries and 25 languages.
Dilbert portrays corporate culture as a Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy for its own sake and office politics that stand in the way of productivity, where employees' skills and efforts are not rewarded, and busy work is praised. Much of the humor emerges as the audience sees the characters making obviously ridiculous decisions that are natural reactions to mismanagement.
Themes explored include:
The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Montreal’s La Presse,The Gazette, the Florida Times Union, the Indianapolis Star, the Providence Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Brisbane Courier-Mail, the Windsor Star, The Economic Times and San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications, run the comic in their business section rather than in the regular comics section, similar to the way in which Doonesbury is often carried in the editorial section due to its pointed commentary.
"Xerox management had recognized what more gullible Dilbert readers did not: Dilbert is an offbeat sugary substance that helps the corporate medicine go down. The Dilbert phenomenon accepts—and perversely eggs on—many negative aspects of corporate existence as unchangeable facets of human nature...As Xerox managers grasped, Dilbert speaks to some very real work experiences while simultaneously eroding inclinations to fight for better working conditions."
Adams responded in the February 2nd, 1998 strip and in his book The Joy of Work, simply by restating Solomon’s argument, apparently suggesting that it was absurd and required no rebuttal.
In 1997, Tom Vanderbilt wrote in a similar vein in The Baffler magazine:
"Labor unions haven’t adopted Dilbert characters as insignia. But corporations in droves have rushed to link themselves with Dilbert. Why? Dilbert mirrors the mass media’s crocodile tears for working people—and echoes the ambient noises from Wall Street."
Bill Griffith, in his daily strip Zippy the Pinhead, used his strip as a forum to criticize Adams' artwork as simplistic. Adams responded on May 18, 1998, with a comic strip called Pippy the Ziphead, “cramming as much artwork in as possible so no one will notice there’s only one joke...[and] it’s on the reader.” Dilbert notes that the strip is “nothing but a clown with a small head who says random things” and Dogbert responds that he is “maintaining his artistic integrity by creating a comic that no one will enjoy.” In September of the same year, Griffith mocked Adams by mimicking his Pippy the Ziphead creation with a strip showing stiff, Dilbert-like creations in an office setting and one of the characters saying, "I sense a joke was delivered."
In the late 1990s, an amateur cartoonist named Karl Hörnell began submitting a comic strip parodying both Dilbert and the series The Savage Dragon to Dragon creator Erik Larsen. This soon became a regular feature in the Savage Dragon comic book, titled The Savage Dragonbert and Hitler’s Brainbert (“Hitler’s Brainbert” being both a loose parody of Dogbert as well as the Savage Dragon villain identified as Adolf Hitler’s disembodied, superpowered brain). The strip began as a specific parody of the comic book itself, set loosely within the office structure of Dilbert, with Hörnell doing an emulation of Adams' cartooning style.
The strip has also popularized the usage of the terms “cow-orker” and PHB. The word “frooglepoopillion” is occasionally used for an extremely large number, a word coined by the marketing department at the company where Dilbert works, in a strip where it was revealed that the company owed so much money that no word existed to describe the number.
Some fans have used “Dilbertian” or “Dilbertesque” to analogize situations in real life to those in the comic strip.
The lamentation "You had ones? Lucky you, all we had were zeros!", commonly used in IT industry, also originated in a Dilbert comic strip. This dates from a strip from September 1992, in which Dilbert responds by saying "You had zeros? We had to use the letter 'O'".
To demonstrate what can be achieved with the most mundane objects if planned correctly and imaginatively, Adams has worked with companies to develop “dream” products for Dilbert and company. In 2001, he collaborated with design company IDEO to come up with the “perfect cubicle”, a fitting creation since many of the Dilbert strips make fun of the standard cubicle desk and the environment it creates. The result was both whimsical and practical.
This project was followed in 2004 with designs for Dilbert’s Ultimate House (abbreviated as DUH). An energy-efficient building was the result, designed to prevent many of the little problems that seem to creep into a normal building. For instance, to save time spent buying and decorating a Christmas tree every year, the house has a large (yet unapparent) closet adjacent to the living room where the tree can be stored from year to year.
Dilbert was named the best syndicated strip of 1997 in the Harvey Awards and won the Max & Moritz Prize as best international comic strip for 1998. In the Squiddy Awards, Dilbert was named the best daily strip of 1996 and 1997, and the best comic strip of 1998 and 2000. The strip also won the Zombie Award as the best comics strip of 1996 and 1997, and the 1997 Good Taste Award as the best strip of 1996.
# Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons — April 16, 1989 (first strip) to October 21, 1989 # Build a Better Life By Stealing Office Supplies # Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless # Shave the Whales — October 22, 1989 to August 4, 1990 # Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy! — October 5, 1990 to May 18, 1991 # It's Obvious You Won't Survive By Your Wits Alone — May 19, 1991 to December 13, 1992 # Still Pumped from Using the Mouse — December 14, 1992 to September 27, 1993 # Fugitive From the Cubicle Police — September 28, 1993 to February 11, 1995 # Casual Day Has Gone Too Far — February 5, 1995 to November 19, 1995 # Seven Years of Highly Defective People — 1997; strips from 1989 to 1995, with handwritten notes by Scott Adams # I'm Not Anti-Business, I'm Anti-Idiot — November 20, 1995 to August 31, 1996 # Journey to Cubeville — September 1, 1996 to January 18, 1998 # Don't Step in the Leadership — January 12, 1998 to October 18, 1998 # Dilbert Gives You the Business — Collection of favorites before 1999. # Random Acts of Management — October 19, 1998 to July 25, 1999 # A Treasury of Sunday Strips: Version 00 — 2000; color version of all Sunday strips from 1995 to 1999 # Excuse Me While I Wag — July 26, 1999 to April 30, 2000 # When Did Ignorance Become A Point Of View? — May 1, 2000 to February 4, 2001 # Another Day In Cubicle Paradise — February 5, 2001 to November 11, 2001 # What Do You Call A Sociopath In A Cubicle? Answer: A Coworker - A compilation of strips featuring Dilbert's coworkers # When Body Language Goes Bad — November 12, 2001 to August 18, 2002 # Words You Don't Want to Hear During Your Annual Performance Review — August 19, 2002 to May 25, 2003 # Don't Stand Where the Comet is Assumed to Strike Oil — May 26, 2003 to February 29, 2004 # It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It — 2004; strips from 1997 to 2004, with more of Adams' handwritten notes # The Fluorescent Light Glistens Off Your Head — March 1, 2004 to December 5, 2004 # Thriving on Vague Objectives — December 6, 2004 to September 11, 2005 # What Would Wally Do? — 2006; strips focused on Wally. # Try Rebooting Yourself — September 12, 2005 to June 18, 2006 # Positive Attitude — June 19, 2006 to March 25, 2007 # Cubes and Punishment — 2007; a collection of comic strips on workplace cruelty. # This is the Part Where You Pretend to Add Value — March 26, 2007 to January 5, 2008 # Freedom's Just Another Word for People Finding Out You're Useless — January 6, 2008 to October 12, 2008 # 14 Years of Loyal Service in a Fabric-Covered Box — October 13, 2008 to July 25, 2009 # Problem Identified: And You're Probably Not Part of the Solution — 2010 # I'm Tempted to Stop Acting Randomly — July 26, 2009 to May 2, 2010 # Your Accomplishments Are Suspiciously Hard to Verify — May 3, 2010 to ????
Dilbert was adapted into a UPN animated television series, which ran for two seasons from January 25, 1999, to July 25, 2000. The first season centered on the creation of a new product called the "Gruntmaster 6000," including the idea process and testing by one Bob Bastard. The second season had no connecting story arc; plots varied from Wally finding disciples ("The Shroud of Wally") to Dilbert being accused of mass murder ("The Trial"). The second season two-episode finale included Dilbert getting pregnant with the child of a cow, a hillbilly, Robot DNA, "several dozen engineers", an elderly billionaire, and an alien, eventually ending up in a custody battle with Stone Cold Steve Austin as the Judge. Featured voice actors included Daniel Stern as Dilbert, Chris Elliott as Dogbert, and Kathy Griffin as Alice.
* Category:Comic strips set in the United States Category:Comic strips started in the 1980s Category:Comics featuring anthropomorphic characters Category:American comic strips Category:Workplace webcomics
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