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Review [published June 1998]
Scott Adams: Dilbert: Seven Years Of Highly Defective People
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
BUY Dilbert books online from and
alongside the likes of Peanuts.
However, with the widespread infiltration of personal
computers into the workplace during the 90s, 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
016
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