Go back to CNN, Trapper!
Today’s strip with Wally and the Pointy-Haired Boss is really weird. Wally doesn’t even have his ubiquitous coffee cup.
What surprises me about these “guest” artists, is that it doesn’t seem like some of them are even trying to draw it like Adams.
Would be interesting to hear what direction Adams gave. Either “try to make it look like I draw it” or “draw it however the hell you want, just keep a couple of clues to hint at who the characters are supposed to be.”
In yesterday’s strip, who is the guy in the first panel that’s not Pointy-Haired Boss. Is that a regular character or a new one-off character?
Ted the Generic Guy – he’s always getting fired.
I really dislike the current substitute artist. His people are all wrinkly and depressed-looking.
Nobody seems to have posted the real reason, as far as I can see.
For many years, Scott Adams has had an ongoing problem with his drawing hand called focal dystonia. It comes and goes, and sometimes makes it very difficult to draw.
At the moment he’s giving his hand a rest from drawing for a few weeks, hence the guest artists.
So, is the point of the guest artists to display their own style with the artwork, or to “take over” for Adams? I would think that literally hundreds of artists could copy (plagiarize?) Adams so that the cartoon would look normal. In fact, I would think that Adams would already have a team of lackeys to do this kind of thing.
This new guy needs to find a new career. His drawings are awful.
Here’s what he says in his blog:
I also dislike the present style. This may be a clever strategy for Adams to have his own crude drawings appreciated more.
One of the vacation artists from the previous series of substitutes was very good at drawing precisely like Scott Adams. Her name’s Donna Oatney, and her work is right around April 1 of this year.
If Adams ever wants to take a year-long hiatus, I hope she does the strip in his absence.
My all time favorite Dilbert.
Pointy Haired boss…“We need you to increase profit 10%, without spending any money or changing anything.”
Has rung true for all the years since I first read it!
It was already obvious that he was not a cartoonist.
Are these guest artists just doing the artwork while Adams still makes up the jokes?
See post #30.
That’s what the blog entry quoted above says.
If he has so much trouble with his hand he should just go digital. Draw his main characters in a few angles, scan and just copy’n’paste his way to profit.
Damn, I knew I shouldn’t have stopped reading at post #29.
That’s generally what’s done nowadays (at least in webcomics). Artists will often guest draw another’s comic for fun (and they’ll get someone doing theirs, too) and a big part of that is using their personal style. It can be really interesting seeing the stylistic adaptations even though it also feels ‘wrong’.
Scott Adams’s style is so spare and pared-down that it wouldn’t be hard to argue that he’s been doing it the copy’n’paste way for years. Ahem, that’s a joke, in case you didn’t notice the spare, pared-down way I wrote it.
I dislike it too and for some reason, the bad bad drawing makes the jokes seem waaaayy less funny.
Unless he just took a vacation from the joke-writing too…
Yeah! All that drawing! That’s what’s wrong with my hand too! That’s it. Too much drawing.
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it!