It fit right in on the comics page in the 90s. I remember a few of the jokes, but not much else from either it or the cartoon. I wouldn’t be surprised if a close reading of old Dilbert strips revealed hints of Adams’ toxicity, but I’m not inclined to re-read them.
Not sure about toxicity, but his Dilbert books revealed, quite clearly, that he was a nutcase. There were all kinds of bizarre nonsense ideas that he was pushing, and not as a joke, either, but actually seriously.
we could always cover this AH less
I just think most people should just stay the hell away from Scott Adams…
I use Far Side. Especially the oompah band in the avalanche zone.
As the white person in a mixed-race family, one of maybe 3‐5 at our church, and having lived just over 20 years in a neighborhood that’s 20-25% white, Adams is the only thing I’m staying the hell away from.
He’s such a tool.
TIL that Scott Adams lives in the East Bay.
I agree with @abides. Unlike Kanye West, his assholishness has not been the focus of mainstream media reporting because he is not insane and has generally been able to keep it in the “wink wink” plausible deniability lane. (Well, until now? Maybe? We’ll see if this gets any sustained reporting, it probably depends on whether he digs his hole deeper or not when pressed on it.)
So unless you are paying attention, you only know about him as a byline on that comic strip about office drones that cloaks its misogyny and racism in a veneer of general misanthropism.
Not exactly East Oakland though…
Black people only make up 1.6% of the population in Pleasanton, so Adams probably won’t have to go far out of his daily routine to avoid them.
Except that his toxic worldview is behind a lot of the “humor” in his strips. Makes it a bit hard to separate the two.
Could’ve been me, since I love Existential Comics and link to it pretty often. Whoever does it posts some magnificent bon mots on FBook too, e.g.,
Probably have no idea, although the last comics I read by him made his true views pretty obvious. That’s why I dropped him from my list years ago.
Notice that he appears in season 5, the worst one!
As a tech worker in the 90’s Dilbert was “one of us.” Often, one of us would bring in a comic and show the rest of the co-workers (“cow orker,” as I recall) and say something like, “Remember that meeting last week? Read this!” We thought we worked for the most backwards, poorly managed company ever (Bought for “scrap” in its second bankruptcy, so maybe it was). Realizing the crap we went through was more universal, helped us keep our sanity.
That was then. That was the art. As for the artist, he can fuck off!
There’s always space to refine the process. That’s the beauty of our current system: if you’re merely unpleasant, we’ll find a way to strip away any of the sympathetic impulses you have left.
It was a natural progression from smug white guy with Engineer’s Disease to cartoonist who made fun of anyone in corporate life except smug white tech guys to successful cartoonist who became a Libertarian to bitter MAGAt and now to virulent racist.
I went to a book signing of his circa 2002 and it was all basically a rant about how he left his job at PacBell to become a cartoonist because as that most oppressed of minorities, white men, he would hit a glass ceiling in the corporate world.
Last week, on ‘Never Meet Your Heroes’…
