I wrote a long and serious article for this spot, but it came off so pompous that I'll need to do a rewrite lest I get stoned in the street. Putting that aside means I have nothing to post tonight except these hilarious Dilbert strips that my daughter just showed me. I'll put up something better tomorrow.
I always thought Dilbert is something that works best as a three-panel strip posted on cubicle walls or in occasional books.
ReplyDeleteI just wish the 1999-2000 animated series was as good (even though creator Scott Adams was involved in the show)
Those are all mostly early ones from the 80's I think. Scott Adams is no great draftsman but there is a charm to his drawings and they are just undeniably funny. Kind of like the way John K praised the drawings on Beavis and Butthead.
ReplyDeleteRight now I'd say there is more of a streamlined quality to Dilbert and it feels like watching the 12th season of King Of The Hill. Even the last year of the Far Side felt oddly lifeless at times. I think it has something to do with the "lack of progress leads to stagnation and decline" thing, like what happened to ancient Rome.
A lot of cartoons feel like if the Beatles had started out playing Love Me Do and I Wanna Hold Your Hand and 20 years later were still writing those type of songs.
Maybe draw a strip in Dilbert style about your struggle with photoshop and the rest.
ReplyDeleteI think the lifelessness comes from becoming overly refined. You keep drawing the same thing over and over again, you start to get too slick at it and unconsciously weed out interesting irregularities. I mean, it's hard to call Dilbert's drawings "slick", but it's kind of the same thing as being forced to use model sheets for consistency.
ReplyDeleteAHHH!! MY EYES!
ReplyDeleteYou think you could turn off comment moderation Eddie? It can take hours for comments to get approved and it would be nice to be able to have discussions and back forth and whatnot is something resembling realtime.
ReplyDeleteIf trolling or spam or whatever made you turn it on in the first place becomes a problem again you can bring it back but everyone seems pretty civil here. I think your blog is in the "sweet spot" where you have a lot of regular commenters and readers but not so many that it would be a trainwreck if you didn't have any filters like John K's blog would be.
Reading the whole story about Scott Adams writing the first 50 strips is really endearing. Just a guy with a weird sense of humor trying to make stuff he found funny.
ReplyDeleteIt's still quite popular with cubicle dwellers and gets linked to constantly on blogs and aggregators and all that but as someone who doesn't really have any interests in the specifics of the business world I don't feel any desire to read it anymore. He's already made the point that managers don't listen to underlings and make impossible demands of engineers, I don't really care to see it applied to every new inane business practice and trend that comes along.
The older ones focused more on Dilberts home life and went on a lot of weird philosophical diversions and some of the storylines were completely insane. I think a cartoonists main goal should be to make fun of people and humanity as a whole, hubris and vanity and all that good stuff. That third comic in particular is just pure misanthropy and it's beautiful.
Anon: I hate comment moderation and I'll gladly turn it off. Thanks for reminding me to do that.
ReplyDeleteWho are you, really? What have you done with Eddie?
ReplyDeleteMike, I'm very concerned about Eddie.
ReplyDeleteDilbert's drawn on a computer nowadays by Adams (for physical reasons) which accounts for its "clean" look nowadays. There are some commenters here that do not care for the strip (some rather more intensely than others),yet the strip and its commentary on the inane complexities of middle management incompetency, yawning cubicle worker drudgery and crappy inscrutable technology still resonates highly among its huge reader base, both online and in newspaper syndication.
ReplyDeleteBlame it on Mike Judge (Office Space) and Ricky Gervais(The Office) for recognizing and energizing this "market segment".
It's a big internet for everybody, there's enough room for all talents
to effectively compete for eyeballs out there.
What's wrong with getting stoned in the street? Oh wit you mean LITERALLY stoned. Never mind.
ReplyDeleteI get that Scott is trying to appeal to specific market segment but if I was on the board of the secret royal cartoonist society I would have Scott summoned to our underground mountain castle and his sceptre ceremoniously destroyed and his Mad magazine pins confiscated for he is no longer a cartoonist.
ReplyDeleteI noticed what the first anonymous post said. These are early takes before a style was codified into cut and paste plus word balloons that paid assistants and ad agencies could mass assemble.
ReplyDeleteBut it also points to the entire era of the Can Not Draw school of newspaper strips. Whatever used the least ink and distracted least from the classifieds, I guess is prime fodder for the Comics Editor.
But they probably had fresher quirkier ideas than the staid well drafted scripts with roots at least 20 years before. And they appealed to a demographic, graphic skills be damned.
Why did Andy Capp and Dagwood sleep on the couch so much?
I wouldn't entirely agree that Scott Adams can't draw. When it was good Dilbert kind of reminds me of Eddie's post on the Far Side in that a lot of the humor came from the staging and really did reflect how Scott Adams sees people.
ReplyDeleteThere's a ton of sketch blogs and deviantart pages for artists with brilliant construction, anatomy and draftsmanship but the sensibility behind the drawings reflects a bland and uninteresting outlook. I would have no problem arguing that Scott Adams is a much better artist than Frank Cho or Alex Ross.
Scott himself has said that he's not the best artist in the world. He just liked doodling and decided to give "Dilbert" a shot. All the syndicates rejected it except United Media. Seeing how successful the strip became, I'm imagining that the editors who passed on the strip is pretty pissed right now.
ReplyDeleteThe strip's art doesn't bother me too much. It's pretty inoffensive, in fact. And I forever have respect for Mr. Adams because he pushed his syndicate into distributing "Pearls Before Swine". The artwork was VERY crude in the first year or so, but it improved. Lately the cartoonist has been experimenting with exaggerated facial expressions to make it more cartoony and less cut-and-paste.
I like Pearls Before Swine, he's the only guy who seems like he's trying to do anything interesting. My only problem is that the gags and plotlines are getting a bit repetitive.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
ReplyDeleteI'll admit that I'm getting weary of those Sunday strips he does where it's nothing more than a long, complicated setup for an incredibly lame pun, ending with Rat threatening the cartoonist with violence.
Danny Donkey, however, is god.
haha, this reminds me of the time you posted those pictures of Sgt. Bilko comics and Lindsay Lohan with a hairy chest.
ReplyDeleteOkay, WHAT was the theme of the unposted, long and serious, worthy-of-stoning article?
ReplyDeleteJust one word. A bone-anything! Please?
Jenny: Sorry it took me so long to respond. I got very busy! I'd really rather not say what the article was about before having a chance to clean it up!
ReplyDelete