Excuse Me While I Wag

A great cartoonist passed away. His name was Richard Thompson, and he drew "Cul de Sac" from 2007 to 2012 until Parkinson's disease ravaged him and he died in 2016.

All joking aside, "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams passed last month. I was a fan of the strip growing up, though it became apparent as time went on that Adams was a difficult, unpleasant man. Circa 1996-97 I had the comic strip collections, a subscription to his quarterly newsletter, even the Dilbert and Dogbert dolls. Entering puberty, I latched on to Adams' --and technically Dogbert's-- cynicism and heavy sarcasm. (The animated series that ran on UPN in 1999-00 is a lost gem, but I'd attribute most of that to Larry Charles.) If nothing else, I am grateful that Adams and his creation gave me an early warning about the drudgery and absurdity of corporate America. Dilbert the milquetoast engineer, however was an avatar for logic in an increasingly illogical world.

Alas, like so many things in pop culture in recent years, there's the matter of separating the art from the artist. I am acquainted with people that met and knew Scott Adams; only "Pearls Before Swine" creator Stephan Pastis had anything kind to say upon his death. Interviews and second-hand interactions suggested a difficult and unpleasant man, this 2015 blog entry suggested that he was steadily going off the deep end, lost his sense of irony, or both. Then Adams started questioning the scope of the Holocaust, made highly misogynist remarks, and most pivotally, a COVID/vaccine skeptic, and finally a casual racist. After his syndicate dropped him post-haste, "Dilbert" moved online (behind a paywall) and Adams hosted a livestream until he randomly decided you can treat terminal cancer with horse dewormer.

Scott Adams was probably the last newspaper cartoonist to ever become a household name. Today's funnies are dominated by decades-old "heritage" strips where the creator is long dead, with little room for young or new talent. Part of that is because of the economics of modern media, but that's another blog for another time. For a few years in the 90s, Adams was a breath of fresh air. He also had a particularly strange, self-inflicted fall from grace.  

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Ten Years On

January 18th marks ten years since my father died. It was the unfortunate culmination of a nearly three-year battle with brain tumors and lymphoma, and I've spent most of the weekend trying to compose my thoughts on this unfortunate milestone. 

Ken had undiagnosed autism, I'm almost certain. He was a man of many quirks: he almost always wore black slacks; he had an obsession with the stock market and read the business section of the newspaper first; he had very few friends, and most of them lived out of state; he thought Tic-Tacs functioned like aspirin and vitamins and consumed them in large quantities. He was 46 when I was born; there were all apparently habitudes from before I was born. When he learned how to use a PC late in life, my sister and I realized his Yahoo search history was mostly three things: NASDAQ quotes, baseball scores, and Filipina porn.

Peccadillos aside, his second-greatest obsession was sports. Between him and my roommate passing 18 months ago, I miss having someone around the house that I can talk baseball and football with. That weighed heavily on me as I watched the Bears-Rams game last night. Both men would've been entertained, even if the outcome wasn't what we wanted.

On the flip side, Ken's passing meant avoiding nearly a decade of political arguments. My father was a third-generation center-right Republican, and one of his last lucid political thoughts was that was "leaning toward John Kasich" in the 2016 primaries. I have little doubt he would've come around to Donald Trump's "clown show" (his words) but not necessarily get dragged into the conservative misinformation outlets of the internet. I remember how annoyed he was that I had skepticism about the war in Iraq in early 2003, insinuating that I was brainwashed or imprudent in my own right. Beyond that, I was cautious about expressing my two cents about world affairs face to face.

For my original eulogy post, click here.

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