https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/dilbert-comic-stripped-from-nearly-80-newspapers/?amp=1
Dilbert has been dropped by Lee Enterprises newspapers. They describe it as a business decision and have also dropped other strips.
I have given up on Dilbert. Scott Adams started out making a funny strip about tech office life. Now he is either recycling old ideas or writing right-wing attacks on liberal social issues. He should have retired when he was at the top of his game.
It wasn’t just Dilbert. Lee slashed the comics sections of all their newspapers’ print editions to as low as a half-page of black and white strips. They also dropped strips that are currently running in favor of “classics” like Peanuts and For Better or For Worse. Online subscribers get more strips, but they look like they all come from one syndication service.
Newspapers are in a death spiral: they keep cutting costs and offering their subscribers less and less, and they keep having fewer and fewer subscribers.
Neither of these stopped the author from insinuating he was being canceled due to a particular comic, however.
I stopped reading him when he came out as a Trump supporter and admirer. Suddenly, he just didn’t seem funny to me anymore.
When I read the thread title, my first thought was “70 Papers? There are that many left?”
What’s “ESG”?
Environmental, Social, and Governance. I had to look it up, too.
Environmental, Social, and Governance
That is, making decisions on things in a way other than the best way of making money.
Now if my local paper would only get rid of the unfunny right-wing rant that is Mallard Fillmore. God, Bruce Tinsley is such a tool …
The paper consistently gets complaints about the strip, but the conservative voices yell about “being silenced” and “the liberal media,” so they cave and keep running it. They pretend they’re offering “balance” by putting it on the editorial page instead of the comics page, but by “balance” they mean they put 40-year-old Doonesbury strips next to it.
They still have Dilbert on the comics page. I still read it, though it’s hardly ever funny and pretty blatant in its right-wing-nutjob-ness a lot of the time. Adams is even more of a giant tool than Tinsley, but I don’t see Dilbert as quite as consistently, angrily stupid as Mallard Fillmore is.
You can find lots of comic strips at Gocomics:
I was surprised at the decades old comics listed as “updated today”
From that link from Investopedia found by @Crafter_Man :
ESG investing is sometimes referred to as sustainable investing, responsible investing, impact investing, or socially responsible investing (SRI). To assess a company based on ESG criteria, investors look at a broad range of behaviors and policies.
IOW, what fellows like Scott Addams insultingly refer as “Woke Capitalism” just the usual coming from guys that besides hating corporations that take the environment into account, he and others hate also the companies that bother to make an effort in being inclusive.
Indeed; that’s “the syndicator/creator has provided this strip for today,” rather than “this is a new strip for today.” In most cases, it’s a matter of the creator having died (e.g., Peanuts), retired from the strip (e.g.,Calvin and Hobbes, For Better or for Worse, Get Fuzzy), and/or now only doing new strips for Sundays (Doonesbury, Foxtrot).
Cancelling 24 comics at once was obviously a way to target Dilbert? Really? If so, then why did Lee also cancel Red and Rover, which seems to be a strip about left-wing commie dogs?
And this report from the heartland:
And yet:
The larger, more fascinating issue here is the kneejerk outrage. We haven’t seen any evidence of Leftist woke mobs chasing Adams down the street, cleverly disguised in Antifa hoodies, demanding he publish a strip series praising “The 1619 Project.”
Locally, we haven’t even seen a subscriber object to “Dilbert’s disappearance. “Zits” — yes. “Tundra” — BIG yes. “Dilbert” — crickets. Canceling “Cryptoquote” certainly awakened some Missoulian readers, but that’s about as close to a woke mob as this corporate-ordered capitalist bean-counting exercise has got.
Trying to incite social victimhood over a fake atrocity is malicious. Falling for it is stupid.
Scott Adams is a dillhole.
Last year Adams took to Twitter to claim that the TV cartoon “Dilbert” was cancelled because he was white.
His reasoning was that the network, UPN, had decided to dump shows about and by white people in favour of show about and by black people.
I looked into it. Of the eight scripted shows UPN debuted the season after “Dilbert” was cancelled, seven had mostly white casts.
He blocked me for pointing this out.
The TV Dilbert also sucked. It was nothing like the strip. They tried to make it like Peanuts for the corporate world.
Except, if your customers put priority on environmental, social and governance issues, and spend their money accordingly, responding to those issue may be the best way of making money.
Dilbert was a brilliant comic strip for its first ten years. There are only so many jokes you can make about office humour and engineers, though. History will judge many comics better - Calvin and Hobbes, Herman, The Far Side, Doonesbury, you could go on for quite a while. I am unaware of any strip currently published in the papers worth a lot of my time. Are there good political cartoonists left (New Yorker and The Economist have their moments)? We live in touchy times, where people lack perspective or pretend to be outraged by tchotchkes.
My local paper, for which I still take the dead-tree edition, is a Lee Enterprise, ahem, enterprise.
“Dilbert” took a nosedive when he stopped wearing that distinctive tie.
People are complaining in droves, mostly because they changed the crossword puzzle to something that was much more difficult and complicated.
You’re in Canada, right? (Or is that my failing memory?) Do you get a different edition of The Economist? Because my American edition doesn’t have a political cartoonist or any other kind.
Technically, The New Yorker has never had a political cartoonist either.
As for length, no comic strip in history has been great past its glory days. Trudeau had the gift of society handing him satiric moments by the truckload yet he’s done nothing of worth since he stopped his dailies. Peanuts lasted 50 years and I defy anybody to come up with one memorable idea or character Schulz invented in the last several decades. Nobody mining the same territory has a chance of longevity. Berke Breathed knew this and stopped Bloom County and then embarrassed himself over and over.