I'm Not Weeping For Scott Adams

So Scott Adams has inserted himself into the news:

“Dilbert” author Scott Adams, who has been drawing the comic since 1989, said the strip that pokes fun at office culture was wiped from nearly 77 newspapers.

Lee Enterprises, which owns nearly 100 newspaper companies in the US, terminated the contract with “Dilbert” for unknown reasons, reports Fox News.

“It was part of a larger overhaul, I believe, of comics, but why they decided what was in and what was out, that’s not known to anybody except them, I guess,” said Adams, who noted it coincidentally happened after he incorporated “wokeness” into the stories.

I've followed him long enough to recognize there's nothing new about this. In 2016, he supported Trump, and at the time, he complained that his speaking engagements fell to almost nothing -- and I think he recognized that Trump didn't sit well with the Silicon Valley types and tech workers who felt Adams was on their side. I watched his YouTube channel at the time, and he also noted that he was in print media, an industry where it was harder and harder to make a buck. The syndicates were cutting back then as well, and the reason was simply that there were more and more things they couldn't afford.

Nevertheless, he still gave us YouTubers tours of his brand new mansion. It suited him at the time to point out how well he was doing, notwithstanding he was already having his income cut. But according to Wikipedia, he just turned 65 in June. Wikipedia also says,

In 2020, Adams said: "For context, I expect my Dilbert income to largely disappear in the next year as newspapers close up forever. The coronavirus sped up that inevitable trend. Like many of you, I'm reinventing my life for a post-coronavirus world."

So he predicted what would happen to him this year two years ago, but now he's talking as if this is new and maybe a result of him criticizing wokeness. Beyhond that, he has an MBA and had at least an average MBA career before he hit the big time as a cartoonist in the early 1990s. He must be aware that comic strips have a shelf life; The Far Side was a cartoon series that lasted 15 years and ended with its creator, Gary Larson, retiring at age 44 in 1995. According to Wikipedia,

By late 1994, Larson thought the series was getting repetitive and did not want to enter what he called the "Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons." He retired the strip on January 1, 1995, when he was 44 years old. . . . For the most part, he has also retired from public view: "He refuses to have his picture taken and avoids being on TV", Time magazine wrote in 2003. To Larson, "cartoonists are expected to be anonymous."

That's not Scott Adams, huh? Seems like he's creating an ongoing public drama about how his income is going down and he's practically destitute. But out of curiosity, I went looking for his recent takes on wokeness in the Dilbert strip, and if the one at the top of the post here is any indication, I don't think they're all that funny. I would also hazard a guess that if you're going to go political in a comic strip, you'd better be smart, although Adams claims to have an IQ of 187. Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo, had better moves:

Senator Joe McCarthy’s appearance in the strip in 1953, as a malicious wildcat named Simple J. Malarkey, was a particular “hot potato.” In October of 1954—just before the actual McCarthy would be censured by the Senate—Malarkey made another appearance. This time, the editor of the Providence Bulletin told Kelly that if Malarkey’s face appeared in the strip again, the paper would drop the strip.

Kelly finessed this by introducing a character from Providence, giving Malarkey the line “nobody from Providence should see me!” before he pulls an empty bait bag over his head. This had the double effect of getting rid of Malarkey’s face and making him look like a Klan member. “Now we find we are kidded” the Bulletin’s editor admitted, moving the strip to the op-ed page, where satire was evidently permitted.

What I'm seeing with Scott Adams is more that he's at least smart enough to have known that everything has a sell-by date, but he's having a hard time dealing with it. Even so, whatever his financial situation with the big mansion, he now has payments not to one ex-wife but two, having divorced his most recent one this past spring.

I guess that's what an IQ of 187 gets you