Right. I think Peppermint Pattie and Marcie were the last and they appeared in 1966, 16 years after the strip debuted. But I’ve never accepted them. They live in a different world from the rest of the characters and interact only rarely and awkwardly.
Never seen one in print.
The Week magazine runs a sampling of political cartoons. RealClearNews online does the same.
The strip started locally only a few years ago. I see Guard Duck occasionally but I don’t remember the cat. The crocs are so beyond bad that I’m glad they’re being written out.
When the Dilbert show was running, he had a fan club email newsletter (Dogbert’s New Ruling Class, natch). When the show was teetering on the edge of cancellation, he asked the folks in the fan club to help out - not by watching or getting friends (especially those with Nielsen boxes!) to watch, or a letter-writing campaign, or any of that.
No, he asked his fan club for affirmations - everybody sit down and think really hard after the show that it get a certain rating (which he thought was what it would take to save it - I think it was like 6 or thereabouts).
Perhaps a few affirmations would have saved the Dilberito?
I remember seeing an interview with Scott Adams a long time ago, when he was working on developing a type of portable, plant based, nutritious food that could replace all other food. This was before companies like Soylent. From what I recall, Adams spent lots of money to reinvent the frozen burrito.
This must have been 25+ years ago, when I still read Dilbert, and found it funny. I’d stopped reading Dilbert long before Adam’s Trumpist views came out, but back then the food thing showed that just because he could draw a funny cartoon, didn’t mean the rest of his ideas where any good. I did subscribe to his newsletter for awhile, but I just wanted to read something funny, not be told what to think.
I’ve noticed a larger female presence in “Beetle Bailey” in recent years, although it does consist mainly of Miss Buxley, Mrs. Halftrack, and the unnamed soldier who dates Sarge occasionally.
This dog almost certainly inspired Sarge’s uniformed dog, Otto.
And here’s a link to the movie about him. I’ve seen it, and it’s good.
Sgt. Louise Lugg. As a sign of how infrequently I’ve read the strip in recent years, Wikipedia tells me that she was introduced in the strip in 1986; I had no idea she’d been part of the strip for over three decades.
Dang. That there’s one fine burn from up in Montana.
Ditto. Something centered around tech sector corporate culture tends to become repetitive quickly and especially when tech sector corporate culture evolves as quickly as it does (sorry Scott: Dilbert is not just visually but in spirit still the guy in a short-sleeved white buttondown, pocket protector, and a polyester tie that has taken a permanent twist because it’s kept permanently knotted and crammed in the laptop case when not in use. Putting him in a polo with a lanyarded scancard ID is not updating him.)
In any case Adams is a bigger fool than I thought if he believed he would be able to play the victim card after putting his ass out to hang for Trump. That he was right in predicting back when that Trump would go all the way while all the “sensible people” were saying that was impossible, could not happen, does not mean everyone has to join in applause of everything else he comes up with. Yes, he understood where Trump’s persuasion power was coming from, and was not hindered by the presumption of disbelief that others were. But that did not make Dilbert a better comic. So it kept losing market. Free Market at work, Mr. Adams!
Especially since he changed his mind a couple of times. I’ve since purged the details, but Adams had some deranged psychobabble theory about why he thought Trump would win, and then altered it when it looked like Hillary would win, and then (IIRC) again shortly before the election. You don’t get credit for predictions when you go through all possible outcomes. Or when it’s based on nonsense.
At any rate, sensible people were not saying it was impossible for Trump to win.
I always thought affirmations were little pep talks you gave yourself to boost your self-esteem. The way it’s used here sounds almost like prayer. Is this some New Agey thing?
When Adams started Dilbert he was fresh out of the tech sector. When he quit his real job to draw the strip full time, he lost touch with reality. Every strip just recycles about four gags. Wally is lazy; Dilbert is an incel; the boss is a stupid, ass-kissing trend follower; marketing people just care about money. When he runs out of those he just writes some shit about Elbonia.
When he started he was in the tech sector working for Bell Labs. It was a brilliant and sharp take on the corporate tech world in the early dotcom era. Everyone who worked for a big tech company was sure that he worked with them. His first book was great at the time.
As a side note, I worked with a manager in 2000 who was formerly a manager at Bell Labs and knew Adams. I got along very well with the manager but he could be a bit of a dick. He once told me that there was very likely a bit of him in the pointy haired boss.
I think what happened is that there are some wildly successful people, who don’t actually know why they were successful, because it wasn’t particularly due to hard work or anything like that. They can’t admit to themselves that it was mostly just luck, so they go looking for something they did that could have caused their success. But all that they can find is that they really, really wanted it, and so that’s what they attribute their success to, whenever anyone asks.
It’s really a shame that Scott Adams turned out to be an unhinged lunatic, because Dilbert – at least many of the early ones – were very funny, especially when they brilliantly exposed basic truths about corporatocracy and the eternal conflict between engineers and management bean-counters.
Maybe Dilbert is still funny, I don’t know, because the more I know about Adams, the more I’m turned off by it. In retrospect, there were even signs back in one of his early books, The Dilbert Principle, published in 1996, that Adams was a moron.
I remember reading it and remarking on how much of it was bullshit. One thing I remember from it was Adams saying that if he ran a business, he would run it on a strict 9-to-5 schedule. Which struck me as the very antithesis of job satisfaction, especially in science, engineering, or any creative ventures. I imagine he invented that craziness because of his impression that poorly run companies often forced engineers like him to work unpaid overtime. But the reality is that a 9-to-5 rote invariably leads to employees that look forward to 5:00 PM, that look forward to weekends, and that dread Mondays – that is, employees who hate their jobs. The best jobs I’ve ever had were jobs that were so much fun that I’d have been willing to do them for free. I was not “required:” to be there at any particular time, I was required to produce results, and the process of producing results was so much fun that I was often there at all hours. Adams is such a moron that he fundamentally doesn’t even understand the basic concept of job satisfaction.
Nitpicks: Scott Adams worked for Pacific Bell (also known as Pacific Telesis or Pactel), not Bell Labs. And Dilbert started in 1989 and became wildly popular in the early 1990’s, somewhat before the dotcom era.
Adams left Pactel in 1995, after which the sharpness of the humor in the strip immediately and predictably started to decline. Today he’s 65 years old and hasn’t worked for an employer for 27 years, and he is about as in touch with the contemporary workplace as I am, which is to say not at all.
