Last Updated: May 26, 1999
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Friday luncheon
‘Dilbert’ creator skewers work while in pajamas
Cartoonist Scott Adams says he pursued career goals
that would allow him to work in a bathrobe, but pope had that pesky requirement
of being Catholic
By Larry Reisman
Forget about the job held by President Clinton, whose speech Scott Adams
had to follow. The cartoonist says he has one of the real top jobs in the
nation.
Adams, whose comic strip ‘‘Dilbert’’ runs in 1,500 newspapers in 17
languages and 39 countries, told editors that deciding to be a cartoonist
was easy: It was one of four jobs he selected at age 10 because they could
be done while wearing his pajamas.
The others: pope, Supreme Court justice, or successor to Hugh Hefner
at Playboy. Pope was out, Adams said, because he would have to lie on his
application about his religion. He decided against becoming a justice because
he would have to be careful about which videos he would rent when he became
an adult. As for living a life full of beautiful women and parties, the
young Adams feared one big thing: Cooties! It was too much of a risk, he
said.
Adams said he needed to learn how to draw cartoons so he applied to
the Famous Artist School for Young People. His application was rejected
because he was too young to attend: He had to be 12.
So he re-engineered his career plans. He would work hard to get good
grades in school and study economics, then work for "a huge, soulless company
that would suck the life force out of my body. It was an achievable goal.’’
In college, Adams said, he took one drawing class and was encouraged
by the fact that he completed all assignments first in class. The drawback:
Adams received the worst grades in the class.
Still, the cartoon bug was there. All he wanted was to get one printed.
He followed some advice and flooded newspapers and syndicates with Dilbert
samples. Within 28 minutes of his entering the post office, he received
form letters of rejection back from almost everyone, he said.
"This is when I learned that your finer publications actually have an
agent in the post office," Adams said.
A year later, while enduring corporate bureaucracy at Pacific Bell,
Adams got a call from a former mentor who had seen "Dilbert." The mentor
told Adams not to give up, to do another mass mailing. So he did.
Then, Adams said, he got his first break. A syndicate called him to
tell him he ought to take some art lessons.
"I was encouraged," Adams said. "I hadn’t been abused by anyone at that
level, so I felt progress was being made here.’’
Shortly thereafter he received a call from a woman who purported to
represent a syndicate. The problem, Adams said, was that it was a syndicate
he had never heard of and to which he hadn’t sent a package. The syndicate
offered him a 15-year contract.
"Clearly, her credibility was rather low," said Adams, noting he had
never heard of this syndicate, United Media. So he asked her for
references. "Is there any cartoon you handle now that is actually published
somewhere?" Adams asked.
When the woman told him about "Peanuts," "Marmaduke" and about a dozen
other top strips, Adams said, "This is when I realized that my negotiating
position had been compromised."
Still, it was the beginning of a solid career for Adams, who kept his
day job at Pacific Bell for a while. He used his work experiences to generate
the management-bashing that Dilbert and his crew pride themselves in. Eventually,
company officials connected Adams to Dilbert and didn’t find the strip
so funny, he said. He has since given up his career as an applications
engineer there.
Adams, whose work has been syndicated since 1989, also generated laughs
by showing on an overhead projector strips he said never made it past his
editor’s desk.
Reisman is editor of the Press Journal in Vero Beach, Fla.
