Scott Adams shared yesterday the sad news that he suffers from the same sort of metastatic prostate cancer as Joe Biden and that the 67-year-old cartoonist does not expect to live past the summer. That makes this an appropriate occasion to appreciate the genius of Adams’s long-running comic strip, Dilbert.
To my mind, there are five cartoonists on the Mount Rushmore of the funny pages. I’ve previously paid tribute to the granddaddy of them all, Charles Schulz of Peanuts, which ran from 1951 to 2000. The other four all emerged from the 1980s. Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes walked most directly in the footsteps of Schulz, exploring the territory of childhood imagination with a reckless verve that made his strip the evolutionary Peanuts. Watterson’s sly social commentary was decades ahead of his time. Gary Larson of The Far Side specialized in single-panel absurdities and science jokes in a strip without recurring characters. Berkeley Breathed of Bloom County did more contemporary political humor — Doonesbury, if Doonesbury had been funnier and less doctrinaire.
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