The Dilbert Guy is an Asshole and I have Words about this Development
So, some of you might have already heard about this, but it turns out that Scott Adams, the guy behind the 'Dilbert' comic, is an asshole. This is something that we already knew from years back, but Web 2.0 has given him the opportunity to show off the depths of his assholishness to an entirely new generation. To make a long story short, Adams trolled Metafilter using a sockpuppet account to deflect attention from his most recent idiot rants on his blog. Because Adams is the worst kind of imbecile, the sort who thinks that having money means he's automatically smarter than other people, he hasn't learned how to react when people call him on his bullshit.
So he is a 52 year old man engaging in Internet debate tactics that the rest of us learned not to use in our tweens; his responses to critics have been so textbook lolcow that it's a wonder he doesn't already have an Encyclopedia Dramatica entry the length of a Russian novel. Basically, he posts inflammatory posts on the Internet and, when he gets called on them, first insists that he's beyond reproach because he's a filthy rich "certified genius"* (Basically a variant on the Internet tough guy act), then accuses his critics of not being smart enough to understand his genius talking points and/or taking them out of context, then removes the offending post from the Internet (the "Delete fucking everything!" gambit) before finally creating fake Internet fan personalities to rally to his defense. Oh, and of course, if you're able to prove that he's wrong (not hard to do), then it turns out that he was just conducting "a social experiment." Seriously, it's right out of ED's old series on "Internet Final Solutions!"
Adams has compared women to spoiled, irrational children for demanding equal pay for equal work, claiming that men have it just as bad because, you know, they're expected to hold doors open for women. He cries that he's being unfairly persecuted, just like Tea Party granny Marilyn Davenport who distributed pictures of Obama's face superimposed on a monkey. (In typical fashion, Adams is completely, willfully blind to the charged racist history behind the monkey/black association.) He crowed about how, back in his college days, he used legal loopholes to wrest control of extracurricular clubs from inferior humanities and liberal arts majors (If you've read Dilbert, you've no doubt noticed that contempt for anyone who's not an engineer** is a recurring theme in Adams' work.), taking pride in being the weasely villain of every fraternity comedy made in the 80s and/or every character played by David Spade. In another blog post, he dismissed evolution as bunk based solely on the fact that it's too complicated for him to understand. He blasts atheists for being arrogant by trotting out the hoariest of all religious apologetics, Pascal's Wager, and then acting like he totally just discovered this right now, dudes. When the posters on Metafilter criticized him, he jumped in as sockpuppet "PlannedChaos" to sing his own praises. After being unmasked, Adams defended his behavior by arguing that the Metafilter posters would have been biased against him if he'd argued as himself. Thus he totally had to sockpuppet so that people would consider his evidence objectively. (Interestingly, everyone still dogpiled the sockpuppet for being an idiot, so if Adams proved anything it's that his "evidence" was shit.) Oh, Adams also argued that sockpuppeting on the Internet isn't as bad as genocide, so, uh, I guess that makes it all okay.
These cringe-inducing episodes of douchbloggery have attracted some small amount of media attention over the last few days, but they're only the most recent manifestation of Adams' inner asshole. Some of you whippersnappers may be too young to remember a little incident back in the late 90s, concerning a particular webcomic called Leisuretown. Basically, Leisuretown author Tristan Alexander Farnon wrote a story arc that involved a disgruntled office worker creating racist, homoerotic, scatalogical mash-ups of Dilbert comics and posting them around his office. The syndicate hit Farnon with a cease and desist letter, threatening legal action unless he removed the retooled strips. Not content with just letting the lawyers handle this, Adams decided to get personally involved because, hey, he's a big man, he's got a big dick. Adams sent Farnon a curt, menacing email: "Do you want to go to jail?" Always a class act. Oh, also, technically, you don't get jail time for penny-ante copyright infringement, but what do I know? I'm not a certified genius like some.
So you see Adams' recent outbursts are really just par for the course with him. You might wonder why a guy like Adams who's already richer than God feels the need to come crawl around in the ditches with us common folk. We all know that, as some measure of a celebrity, he's already lost the fight just by acknowledging critics. Why does he not only feel like he needs to confront critics but also consistently do it in the most assholish way possible? It's instructive to look at how other cartoonists have handled Internet critics. Bil Keane of "The Family Circus" objected to an old website called "The Dysfunctional Family Circus," wherein readers would submit raunchy new captions for Family Circus Strips. Although the syndicate made subtle hints about the possibility of legal action if the site wasn't removed, the whole matter was settled amicably after Keane had a long and civil phone conversation with the webmaster. The result was the webmaster felt kind of guilty about mocking Keane's strips and just took them down. When Francesco Marciuliano took over "Sally Forth," he found that kids on the Internet were deriding the strip for being hokey and out of date. He posted frequent responses to such criticism, but was always careful to keep the dialogue civil and ultimately won a legion of new fans by proving that he didn't take such insults personally. Jim Davis seems to have taken his Internet criticism in stride, even joining in on the mockery himself by publishing his own book of "Garfield without Garfields." Notorious Christian fundie Jack Chick (the guy who makes all those delightful little cartoon booklets about how you're going to hell that you find in bathrooms and bus stations) is a frequent target of ridicule online, but he's only ever reacted once -- and that was to claim copyright infringement because one parodist had used Chick's original art and just reworded them. In contrast to Adams' behavior in the Leisure Town incident, though, Chick didn't feel the need to personally bully his opponent, instead letting his lawyer make his case for him. The parodist took down the cited art and later replaced it with near exact replica art that he himself had drawn. This was apparently satisfactory to Chick. ***
The point is, none of these guys are near the raging dildo that Adams is. That may be because Davis, Marciuliano, Davis and Chick are guys who have worked hard to get where they are. And they all obviously love the cartooning craft. (I know that Davis is more a marketer than a cartoonist, but you can still see a certain joy in creation evident in his early Garfield strips. And say what you will about Chick's religious beliefs, but his cartoons are so lovingly rendered that you know the man must love to draw! )
In contrast, Adams hates cartooning. You can tell by looking at his dull, soulless thing he calls a strip. It's not just a lack of drawing ability, though; Gary Larson was never a particularly good artist, but his drawings still had soul and character. He experimented with perspective and depth; he challenged himself to tell complete stories in a single panel. The man put heart into his work. Even Cathy Guisewitz, whose comic is rightly despised by all right-thinking people, managed to imbue her art with some life. Adams' strips all feature expressionless characters so monotone that make the cast of Tim Buckley's Cntl Alt Del look like manic, standing around ram-rod straight in a void. The "camera" angle is always a from the waist up side shot. The background is a color fill. There's never any hint at depth or shading. That's it. Honestly, cartoons don't have to be high art; they just have to be good enough to get the joke across. So there's nothing inherently wrong with the fact that Dilbert's art is crap if the writing can make up for it. (Whether it can is debatable). But the point is that anyone with any love at all for the craft of cartooning would have tried to shake it up a bit, but Adams never varies, never does anything but the very bare minimum needed to shoehorn in another depressing "Work sucks, huh?" punchline. There's nothing about the "Dilbert"" strip itself that stands out. Everything about it is lazy. All Adams did was to be the right lucky stiff at the right time and ride that zeitgeist to fame and fortune. Just think: You could have replaced Adams with any other hack and as long as jokes ended with "That boss sure is dumb," the comic would have been equally successful. But do you think "Calvin and Hobbes" would have been equally successful with anyone other than Bill Watterson behind the wheel? Or could you see "Bloom County" becoming the phenomenom it was without Berkeley Breathed? The answer you're looking for is no.
Adams' responses to his detractors are characteristic of a man who's led an easy life and never had to think very deep or very long about anything. It turns out that Adams is also an outspoken Libertarian (He took his sockpuppet account name from the title of a book by Cato Institute darling Ludwig Mises). This isn't surprising. Libertarianism is a political philosophy especially beloved by smooth-brained bumblers who accidentally stumble into success and desperately crave a simplistic "survival of the fittest" worldview that reassures them that they deserve their amazing good luck while better people are starving.
So Adams knows that his success was pure luck. It certainly wasn't due to ability or talent. But Adams doesn't like that story, so he's spent all these years trying to convince us that he somehow deserves that luck, because he's smarter and funnier and better than we are. He's not actually smarter or funnier or better than we are, not by a long shot. But he is richer. That's all he's got, so he has to work backwards from that, he's got to convince us that the one flowed from the other, that the only way he could possibly be richer than us is if he were smarter and funnier and better. Rather than just luckier. It's always the people who are the most filled with self-loathing who put on the biggest displays of arrogance.
But then, I don't think Adams is entirely to blame for his ludicrous hubris. Our modern media, in its continuing quest to report ever less actual news, has decided to treat Adams as if he were an actual big-picture financial expert because he draws a cartoon making fun of petty office politics. Which is sort of like hiring Jerry Seinfeld to be a chef because you heard him do a routine about airline food. In 1999, Newsweek did a cover story about Dilbert as if delivering a single punchline ad nauseum (Your boss is dumb) qualified Adams to comment on global economic trends (The take-away from that story? Adams, the hero of oh-so-many beleagured office drones, revealed that he was quite happy to see most of the fanbase who had made him a millionaire get the ax as companies shipped jobs overseas.) Then newspapers made the bizarre decision to start running Dilbert on the business page****, most likely to plug a newshole that otherwise would have had to be filled with boring news (Total yawnsville, am I right, guys?). Then the Wall Street Journal gave him a column, so he could spew his simplistic libertarian drivel. Showing his utter contempt for the small entrepreneurs he so often claims to admire, Adam's only advice for is to start out rich. It's the same advice he peddles in his line of business self-help books, if you can discern even that message between the recycled Dilbert strips and the twenty words of Giant-Easy-on-the-Eyes Readers Digest Condensed-style text per page. So, yeah, I blame the media. Just like overindulgent parents, they coddled Adam's ego until he believed his own hype.
And now the poor baby is crying because no one else believes it anymore.
* - No, really, he actually claims to be a "certified" genius, which just makes me think of that one cartoon where the coyote introduces himself to Bugs Bunny as "Wile E. Coyote, Geeeeeenius."
** - Have you ever noticed that whenever you meet someone who claims to be a scientist but who really has no clue what they're talking about, they always turn out to be an engineer? I think I've heard of, like, a dozen court cases where they get some "scientist" to take the stand and testify that evolution has no evidence or that global warming is a hoax and when the cross-examiner finally asks what their degree is in, they'll say "Electrical engineering" or something. Engineers seem to think of themselves as 1950s B movie eggheads, the sort with a nebulous omni-science degree that qualifies you to pontificate about any branch of science, ever. A friend once mentioned that engineers tackle problems in a very different way than do scientists - scientists kind of go in all directions, but engineers start with a defined conclusion and then ask 'how can we get there?' She suggested that maybe a person with that mindset was more apt to be duped by idiot theories like young earth creationism or Libertarianism.
*** - I'm now told that Chick also threatened to sue Howard Hallis at one point for a Cthulhu-themed parody of Chick's work. I don't know much about that, but I haven't seen any indication that Chick handled himself less than professionally during the dispute.
**** - Which I guess is somewhat similar to the decision made by some of the more chicken shit newspapers to run Doonesbury on the opinion page.