*Dilbert *jumped the shark a long time ago. Adams stopped being funny the day he started taking himself seriously (The Dilbert Principle, anyone?)
And I’m not about to pray to the ruler of Sequential Art Hell for mercy. Schulz’s *Peanuts *stopped being funny 20 years before he died. The only reason it’s still above the fold in the Sunday Funnies is due to inertia and greed on the part of his heirs and syndicate.
I read that in Shoe once, but Lardner might’ve said it first FAIK.
The worst part about this strip was that when Stinky Pete appeared a few days ago, he wasn’t about olfactory stinkiness. The schtick was that he was the guy who always injected a dose of negativity into a project, not that he actually physically smelled bad. You could in principle do a funny strip about either, but mixing them together doesn’t make sense.
I just saw a fart joke when I read that strip.
Me, too. For Stinky Pete, “negative energy” is a euphemism for “bad gas.”
Daniel
I thought it was kinda funny.
And I liked The Dilbert Principle and The Way of the Weasel.
As Snooooopy said, I thought it was a fart joke.
Alice being launced out of the cubicle is funny.
Better still is The Dilbert Future, especially its commentary on the Star Trek holodeck technology. Going from memory:
The Japan Times ran the stinky version on Monday’s edition.
Well I thought it was kinda funny. But a few years ago I actually worked with a guy who smelled so bad that I literally had to leave the room when he was around. So I can appreciate the joke.
No argument there, but that still leaves a good 20 years or so worth of funny left over. Which is approximately 20 years more funniness than Cathy Guisewite, and at least 75 years more than Bil Keane, whose work actually drains funniness from the viewer. It’s fair to say that Schulz didn’t know when to quit, but that shouldn’t necessarily overshadow the legacy of his earlier skill. Just pretend that the real Schulz died in 1985 or thereabouts, and the material after that was produced by some sort of flesh robot, or something. Indeed, this may be the only plausible explanation for the existence of It’s Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown.
Or perhaps I misunderstood your remark to encompass a criticism of Schulz’s earlier work as well, when your reference to “Sequential Art Hell” was instead intended to refer specifically to the modern comics page (an assessment with which I can certainly get on board). But speaking ill of Schulz’s output from about '65 through '80 is a sure sign of mania, or possibly ergotism.
What he said.
Dilbert is largely a display case of one-note cardboard characters: stinky guy; guy who steals other people’s ideas; overly touchy guy. Even the regularly occuring characters are like that. Granted, it’s a comic strip, but he takes it a bit far. I think the only reason it was ever successful was because wage-slaves (including me) could see exaggerated examples of foolishness they saw at their jobs but weren’t about to say anything about. The guy can’t even draw vey well. The only way Adams can pull out of the tailspin would be to have “guy who calls the other employees cow-orkers” or “guy who bases a philosophy of life on siplistic cartoons”. And that ain’t gonna happen, because Mr A actually thinks he’s talented, instead of being a conduit for cubicle-serfs’ submitted gripes.
Or “guy who can’t type very well”.
I have not lived a sheltered life. I’ve been a waiter, I’ve been a fast-food worker, and once I spent months holding down a sales table at a flea market. Yet, somehow, I never fully appreciated the potential range of unpleasant human body odors until I started working the reference desk at a public library. Why is that, I wonder?
Co-workers or seekers after knowledge?
The latter. Patrons/users. (Mainly, users of our bank of Internet-linked computers – I must get three times as many requests for help using those as for help finding a book.)
In fact, it’s my experience there that prompted me to start this GQ thread. That, and the same question coming up in this GD thread.
I’d be careful about calling Schulz’s heirs greedy. Before their father died, they drew up contracts with Universal Press Syndicate refusing to allow anyone else to draw, write or otherwise create new storylines for the Peanuts characters, which Schulz found to be great comfort. The fact that the strip has enough intertia to remain above the fold in some Sunday newspapers is more a testament to the quality of Peanuts as a body of work and its popularity with several generations of fans.
Homeless people in the summertime frequently use public libraries to stay out of the heat, read and wash up.