Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, died today of prostate cancer at 68.
Adams satirized the world of cubicle-based IT and engineering in Dilbert, which at its height appeared in 2,000 daily newspapers and was later anthologized in numerous books.
Dilbert was an engineer with few social skills, but he always knew more than his pointy-haired boss, a caricature of terrible supervisors everywhere who managed to make the life of those who actually knew what they were doing—the engineers—much harder than it needed to be.
In his last two decades, Adams shifted increasingly from the world of comics to politics, where he became increasingly vocal—and abrasive—about his conservative views and his support for Donald Trump.
In the final years of his life, these attitudes cost him most of what he had built with Dilbert. For instance, in 2022, as Rolling Stone recounts, “over 75 newspapers dropped Dilbert after Adams introduced the strip’s first Black character, which he then used as a prop to mock ‘wokeness’ (the character identified as white and LGBTQ+ for work purposes).”
The next year, Adams lost far more papers when he offered commentary on a poll finding that just 53 percent of black Americans agreed with the phrase “It’s OK to be white.” (The phrase appears to have originated from alt-right users of 4chan.)
Adams took to his podcast to discuss the poll. The New York Times summed up his remarks:
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people,” [Adams] said on the podcast episode, then they are a “hate group.” He added, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”
This resulted in Dilbert‘s cancellations from most major papers. Adams later insisted on his website that he was not, in fact, a “big ol’ racist” and that he was speaking “hyperbolically, of course, because we Americans don’t have an option of staying away from each other.”