Scott Adams revealed today that he, like Biden, has aggressive Prostate cancer and says he will be gone by the Summer.
A few years ago he revealed himself to be a pretty awful person (I suspect his first divorce broke his brain because he seemed more normal before then) and he always seemed to me to not be as smart as he really wanted to present himself to be but Dilbert gave me some laughs in its time and it sounds like he is going through some rough symptoms. I guess all you can do is hope he makes peace with his mistakes before the end.
That’s a very generous and positive point of view on Scott Adams, his work, and his later viewpoints. Respect!
Having heard about how unpleasant aggressive prostate cancer can be (as well as treatments for such) I hope he finds much peace, and does no harm in the time he has left.
I assume you mean his political views and not his hyper-marketing strategies. I actually would rather comic strip artists engaged in neither and have a lot of respect for Bill Waterson and Gary Larson more for their anti-marketing of their stuff (and alas, choosing to go out at the top of their game). Though it would bother me if either suddenly went public again as MAGA.
I haven’t gotten over James Lileks and Dennis Miller (edited by me for political commentary in CS)
Still, I agree with your last line. I didn’t know there was an “agressive” form of tthis cancer. In my ignorant mind I thought doctors would say “You’ll die of something else before this” - doesn’t King Charles have it? And is Biden also going to die soon?
He took no action while watching his son die from addiction. I won’t celebrate Scott Adam’s passing, nor will I be as sad about it as I ought to be. So it goes.
I’m well aware that in his later years Adams turned into a Trump-supporting conspiracy-prone nutjob. The fact remains, though, that the Dilbert strip brought us some great and very funny insights into corporate stupidity, and the clueless Pointy-Haired Boss became iconic. Whatever his many faults, especially in his later years, Adams’ comical characters brought smiles to millions over the years. How one feels about the distinction between the art and the artist is a matter of personal values.
It’s a discussion as old as time, and something everyone needs to decide for themself. Nevertheless, Dilbert was a subversive and wickedly funny strip when the comic page was drowning in the sad morass of Marmaduke, late stage Garfield, and the like.
Scott Adams has alwaysbeen a weirdguy in the “Let me tell you what I heard last night on Coast-to-Coast AM” way, and has long had a reputation for being unpleasant to deal with.
Even when Adams was near the top of his game, an older gentleman i respect pointed out that if he really believed the stuff he wrote, he had some pretty fucked up ideas about corporate America. And i reread his comics in that light, and realized my friend was right.
Perhaps the corners he experienced were really a lot worse than the ones i did, or my friend did. And I was fired by a guy who looked and acted a lot like the pointy haired boss, for kind of weird reasons.
But Adams was often funny. And he never did me any direct harm. And i don’t relish human suffering. So i ought to feel bad for him.
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I’m struggling with it. I hope he doesn’t suffer too much, but I’m not going to miss him.
I never really got his humor so all I really have is the impression left by that Behind the Bastards series. It’s not a good impression. He’s probably blaming his cancer on diversity hire doctors or something.
“Dilbert” never was the same after he abandoned his characteristic necktie.
My local newspaper used to carry “Marmaduke” on Sundays, and I would always read it because it was my grandmother’s favorite comic. She died in 1990.
As for him “not supporting his stepson through drug addiction”, is nobody here aware that addiction also creates justified estrangement, and maybe they all told him that he was out of their lives until he cleaned up his act?
I remember that even in the generally excellent and funny older Dilbert strips, there were incipient signs of Adams’s inner nutjob. One that I only vaguely remember was casting doubts on climate science. But another that I remember more specifically was about prison sentences.
Adams illustrated his belief with a cartoon in which Dilbert was the stand-in for the liberal belief that lengthy prison sentences don’t reduce crime. Dogbert’s response was “so, you believe that while criminals are in jail, other people step in to do their crimes”.
No, you ineffable right-wing moron, that’s not what liberals believe. The reality is that more reasonable sentences have been shown to be more conducive to rehabilitation, while lengthy sentences tend to be associated with creating career criminals and a higher rate of recidivism. This concept was apparently way too subtle for Adams.
I started being suspicious of Scott Adams a long time ago.
I have to share my favorite Dilbert cartoon of all time. I still think it’s gold regardless of everything else he has done in his life.
I was a big fan at one time because at the height of its popularity (at the tail end of the 20th century, when the Dilbert TV show premiered), that was when I myself was going into the office world. Previously, my work experience had been a mix of retail and labor, and all of a sudden I am in an office environment with all of the culture and politics that brings. Dilbert seemed to match what I was seeing so well.
Heck, I remember Scott Adams’ web site, where he had his comic and newsletters, and eventually opened a comment section on his daily strips, and I participated in that community back then. That was so very long ago.
Eventually, as I acclimated to an office environment, the Dilbert humor just felt stale and like a cliche. It lost its bite and I got bored and moved on.
Then I learned that he had gone full nutjob. Even when I was a fan, I knew the guy was weird. He was pushing weird products and some of the messaging in his “Dogbert’s New Ruling Class” newsletters (yes, I signed up for them back then) was extremely bizarre. But I wrote that off as the kind of eccentric stuff you expect from creative types; it just kind of goes with the territory. When I found out he was totally crazy, at first I thought no way, then thought some more and decided, yeah, I guess that’s not the biggest surprise.
Dilbert was a 90s comic. I don’t mean that in a bad way, more that the premise could only run for so long and the tech boom of the 90s was the perfect time for it. But you could tell he was getting weirder as early as The Dilbert Future and at some point I just stopped reading it. Well, I stopped reading most comics once I no longer had access to a daily newspaper and didn’t think to go to a website like gocomics every day.
