I was as big a Dilbert fanboy as anyone else working in white collar work (esp. tech) in the 90s and 00s. I had the wall calendars, the comic-a-day calendars, the collections … I had Dilberts posted outside my office door or my cube wall … I even incorporated Dilbert comics into (yes I feel the irony) PowerPoint presentations, always garnering laughter from the audience. It was all jolly, slightly-transgressive-toward-management fun.
Until it stopped being that.
Adams veering off to the zany Right (or becoming more public about it, one way or the other), made it all less fun, and invited reviewing some of those comics that had seemed just standard office humor when originally published.
But even where the humor was still funny, Adams became one of those folk for whom I chose not to spend my money any more. He was free to draw and write about whatever he wanted — but I didn’t have to buy it.
I do still have a lot of the older Dilberts saved in the Picture folder bowels of my computer, though.
While I found Adams’ political and social views increasingly repellent, I would never wish death from cancer on anyone, and I am sorry that he suffered what he did.
I’d love to look ahead a few decades (for more reasons than one) and see what Adams’ legacy is. Even now, it’s hard to think of any retrospective on office life in the 90s-00s that doesn’t have Dilbert as a touchstone for white collar concerns and frustrations of that period.
In any case, I’m sorry things went so wrong for him (by his own doing, to be sure), and that his life ended so poorly. I offer up my thanks, though, for all the chuckles he gave me during his career. RIP.