Dilbert 2.0: The Dot-com Bubble
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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
An author named Norman Solomon wrote a book called The Trouble with Dilbert. He got a lot of press. His main idea was that management tolerated Dilbert comics because they gave employees a harmless form of rebellion, and reduced the odds of a real one. Therefore, Solomon argued, Dilbert was really a tool of corporate overlords and not a champion of the working class as people assumed.
By 1998, the dot-com era was in full force, and it was difficult to write comics about hideous workplace events. I literally couldn’t find people willing to complain. The suggestions for Dilbert started to take a far less angry tone, and it made my job substantially harder.
I hoped “porcelain cruise” would enter the vocabulary. I just checked the online Urban Dictionary and there it is. But I can’t be sure Wally was the source.
I’ve drawn myself into the strip a few times. During this period, I was working about eighty hours a week.
The strip below is arguably the naughtiest comic I’ve ever drawn.
But it was subtle enough to fly through the editorial filters.
Amazingly, this comic was based on real events. Apparently the acoustic integrity of cubicles is an issue in some companies.
At this point in my career, I was getting flack from cartoonists who objected to my crass commercialism and minimal artistic talent. Bill Griffith, who does Zippy the Pinhead wrote an article about my lack of artistic integrity. This comic was my reply.
I added this “based on a true story” to the third panel because the strip is only funny if you realize this actually happened to someone. It did.
I felt the strip above was hilarious. I might have been the only one.
I don’t know how this comic got published. It probably helped that the view is from the side. And maybe having a dog as the doctor helped too.
I learned that with a little bit of ambiguity, you can get away with anything.
The strip above came out naughtier than I intended.
I was in search of the holy grail of newspaper comic writing: Using the forbidden word “crap” and getting away with it.
“Crappus” is Latin for a word I wasn’t allowed to put in comics.
The comic above is based on a real event. It isn’t nearly as funny if you don’t know that.
Sometime around this period, I stopped employing an artist to ink the letters, and started doing it myself on the computer. I didn’t have that process worked out yet, and you can see that the space between lines of text is irregular.
As I reviewed the archives to put this book together, I realized I have done some version of this joke at least three times.
The strip above ran in newspapers, but it isn’t how I originally drew it. The original was deemed too naughty. The one that follows below is my original version. It’s punchier, don’t you think?
A surprising number of people asked me to explain the strip below. I guess it is too recursive.
There’s an art to making references that people with impure thoughts recognize as impure and people with pure thoughts don’t notice.
One of my discoveries about writing dialogue is that in real-world conversations, people often say things that seem to have no correlation to what the other person said. People are in their own little worlds.
It’s convenient to have a character that is willing to kill off a character I’m done with.
One of the challenges of cartooning is coming up with situations that are more absurd than reality. This comic is based on a conversation I had with a friend, without the invitation to make out.
On this day, many cartoonists mentioned the Peanuts comic strip as a tribute to Charles Schulz. In this comic, the cashews are offered in exchange for a urine sample; in other words, they are pee nuts. I don’t think anyone made the connection. It isn’t my best work.
I have a casual hobby that involves identifying sentences that have, in all probability, been written or uttered only once in human history. “You frighten my hoagie” is probably one of them.
I had to redraw the last panel because the original showed the top of Wally’s butt crack. Apparently butt cracks are offensive to people who have no mirrors.
This slogan was taken from an actual company, verbatim.
A big part of cartooning is picking the right words. In this case, I doubt there is a funnier word than “moist”..
This is one of my personal favorites. The art is totally irrelevant because the funny part is imagining the scene the boss describes.
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.
Dilbert 2.0: The Dot-Com Bubble copyright © 2008, 2012 by Scott Adams, Inc. All rights reserved. Licensed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information, write to: Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, an Andrews McMeel Universal company, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106.
ISBN: 978-1-4494-2292-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008927324
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