The world of comics lost a significant, if controversial, figure this week. Scott Adams, the mind behind the wildly successful Dilbert comic strip, passed away on January 13 at age 68, following a battle with metastatic prostate cancer that he publicly disclosed last spring.
His former wife, Shelly Miles, broke the news during a livestream, sharing a final message Adams had written for this moment. In it, he reflected on a life fully lived and asked readers to carry forward any value they'd gained from his work. His parting words emphasized usefulness and expressed love for his audience.
A Comic That Captured Corporate America
When Dilbert first appeared in 1989, it struck a chord that would resonate for decades. The strip offered something fresh: sharp, satirical commentary on the absurdities of office life. Before Office Space hit theaters or The Office became a cultural phenomenon, Dilbert was already skewering incompetent management, soul-crushing cubicle culture, and the peculiar miseries of corporate existence.
At its peak, the strip reached extraordinary heights. It ran in more than 2,000 newspapers globally, connecting with an estimated 150 million readers. The accolades followed: Adams received the National Cartoonist Society's prestigious Reuben Award in 1997. That same year, his pointy-haired protagonist made Time magazine's list of most influential Americans—a first for a fictional character.
The Fall from Grace
Yet Adams's later years were marked by profound controversy. In 2023, he made racist remarks during a podcast episode, stating it no longer made sense for white Americans to help Black citizens and characterizing Black people as a hate group. The fallout was swift and severe. Hundreds of newspapers dropped the strip almost immediately.
Adams claimed his words were misinterpreted, but the damage was done. Dilbert's wide newspaper syndication effectively ended. Fellow cartoonist Bill Holbrook captured the industry's response succinctly, noting that Adams wasn't being canceled—he was simply facing the natural consequences of his public statements.
An Enduring Cultural Impact
Despite the complicated circumstances surrounding Adams's legacy, Dilbert's influence on how we talk about work remains undeniable. The strip's critiques of management dysfunction and workplace absurdity were genuinely ahead of their time, and experts believe those themes will persist.
Phil Lohmeyer, a cartoonist and educator from Connecticut, points out that Dilbert's real genius wasn't the characters themselves but the universal frustrations they represented. Middle management incompetence, bureaucratic nonsense, pointless meetings—these weren't just comic fodder. They were shared experiences that made office workers feel seen.
In the 1990s, employees taped Dilbert strips to cubicle walls and forwarded them to colleagues. Today, even middle schoolers use similar humor to question authority and poke fun at institutional absurdities, Lohmeyer observes. The medium may have evolved, but the impulse remains.
As Lohmeyer puts it, Adams transformed workplace frustrations into visual comedy, making the invisible visible. That contribution to our cultural conversation about work—separate from the man himself—likely won't fade away anytime soon.