Scott Adams: How to Destroy a Legacy (3 of 3)
It's easier than it looks.
Lots of writers get crankier with age. Mark Twain became a bitter satirist in his final decade. Lately, J.K. Rowling’s made more news for her bad takes on trans identity than for her wizard fables.
Yet the legacy of Twain’s work endures. Later Twain may have called the world “a grotesque and foolish dream,” but he never put those words in Huck Finn’s mouth. Rowling’s more problematic, but at least kids can enjoy her work without supporting or even knowing her views. There’s no book called Harry Potter and the Warlocks Who Think They’re Witches.
Cartoonists are likelier to taint their own best work, because it’s often serialized over much of their lives. Sometimes the results offer us a view of an artist going off the deep end in real time. I wouldn’t call this one of the joys of the art form, exactly. But it is one of comics’ fascinations.
Dave Sim was a focal point of comic-book self-publishing for over a decade. His Cerebus epic was a masterwork, mixing broad parodies of Conan the Barbarian, the Marx Brothers, and superheroes into a tale of political power worthy of the finest fantasy literature. (I know that sounds impossible, but somehow it worked.)
Until…Sim started writing misogyny and other crackpottery into his text, in ways too obvious for even the most charitable reader to ignore or excuse. (A few readers supported it, but that’s its own problem.)
Al Capp was once the most famous cartoonist in America. He introduced phrases we still use, like Sadie Hawkins dance and double whammy. He reached a level of celebrity hard to imagine today, all on the strength of his rural-South comedy, Li’l Abner.
But even before Capp’s career ended in a flurry of scandals revealing him as a sex predator, Li’l Abner had gone from a charming rustic sitcom to an acerbic attack on those damn hippie college kids.
And Adams?
Dilbert has remained a strip about office culture on its surface. It’s skewered new work trends like COVID-era Zoom calls, quiet quitting, and the Great Resignation. Even in 2023, some of its strips hit their targets. And, to its credit, it keeps up with the news:
But the grievances of its creator have grown hard to escape. Dilbert was never an icon of diversity—Adams makes fun of the word in The Dilbert Principle’s opening chapter. Still, in early strips, demographics other than Adams’ own could score some points:
Here’s how Adams treats “the youngs” today. (Naturally, “the youngs” are the age he was when he started Dilbert.)
How about women? In a workplace context, they’re about as sympathetic as the men. But in a relationship context, the twice-divorced Adams has gone from mocking misogynist theories in 1989…
…to pushing them this year.
Dogbert often gives bad advice, but this joke only works if you take his words as truth or half-truth.
Race, sexuality, gender issues? In 2014, a little pre-Trump, Adams was at least willing to affirm gays’ humanity:
But after 2018, Dilbert has done five jokes about “people with pronouns” and zero poking fun at more old-fashioned gender identity.
Dilbert was about speaking truth to power. Its central joke was that everyday workers knew better than their wealthier “superiors.” But today, the right protects the powerful by speaking lies about the more powerless. It’ll tell you that the real threats to an equal society are “people with pronouns,” feminists, Blacks. Anyone who’s not a pasty-white hetero guy. Failing that, anyone but the rich.
High-profile bad bosses like Trump and Elon Musk should be Adams’ ideal targets. Instead, he now gives these “master persuaders” his slavish devotion. Think things are going well at Twitter? Adams does.
Capp and Sim were once at the top of their games in cartooning. Outside comics-scholarship circles and a few diehard fans, both are nearly forgotten now. Will that be Adams’ fate?
He’s lost his newspaper syndicate, his book publisher, and much of his credibility. But to the readers he’s courted who hate “mainstream media,” that may make him look cool. I’m sure post-newspaper Dilbert will get enough subscribers to pay for the time Adams spends on it—and even if it doesn’t, he’s made all the money he needs to.
But Dilbert could have had more. It could have remained an icon. In the long run? In thirty years, when some other puzzle-maker is building a tribute to satirists from the Dilbert era, I think they’ll probably go with The Simpsons.
