Chris Mitchell
Dilbert is rapidly becoming enough of a cartoon icon to rival the fame of Disney’s most enduring creations. Chronicling the trials of a hapless IT engineer battling against the absurdities of corporate life, the Dilbert comic strip appears in over 1500 newspapers worldwide. Seven Years Of Highly Defective People is creator Scott Adams’ guided tour of the evolution of Dilbert from geek mascot to unlikely international idol.
The book assembles strips from all stages of Dilbert’s genesis with comments scrawled in the margin by Adams as to what was going through his mind at the time. Each of the major characters, such as Dilbert’s megalomaniacal canine companion Dogbert and the witless Pointy-Haired Boss, get their own chapters with a brief essay about how and why they appeared in the strip.
Thanks to this candid overview, it’s easy to see why Dilbert wasn’t an overnight success when the strip first appeared in 1989. Adams drew heavily on his eight years at Pacific Bell as an applications engineer for inspiration, with many of the jokes revolving around Dilbert’s inherent nerdhood. It was a cult form of humour for IT professionals which didn’t sit easily alongside the likes of Peanuts.
However, with the widespread infiltration of personal computers into the workplace during the Nineties, more and more people began to find Dilbert’s daily dilemmas strangely familiar, especially those which concerned working for a manager who understood nothing about technology. The most popular Dilbert strip ever features his boss being given an Etch-A-Sketch in place of a laptop and not noticing anything amiss.
Adams cannily gauges his audience’s reaction to new threads in the Dilbert saga by including his email address in the margin of each cartoon. As such, an avalanche of Dilbertesque anecdotes arrives in his inbox each morning from disgruntled employees all over the globe. Adams freely admits in Seven Years… to using many of these stories as the basis for his strips, producing the peculiar circularity of Dilbert imitating life imitating Dilbert. Adams has even gone as far as to have the readers vote by e-mail as to whether Ratbert should get pulverised with a hammer. (They thankfully voted no).
The amount of feedback Adams receives from his readers seems due to Dilbert’s essentially subversive nature. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than on the burgeoning Dilbert Web site (www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/), where there is an ever-growing list of draconian companies who have banned Dilbert cartoons from being displayed on cubicle walls because they’re considered “bad for morale.” Seven Years Of Highly Defective People is a concentrated dose of forbidden fun which deserves to be kept in the bottom drawer of any self-respecting office worker’s desk.
