It has led to dozens of books, an animated television series, a video game, and hundreds of themed merchandise items.
[10][11] The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst Media dropped Dilbert in October 2022 saying the move came after strips joked that reparations for slavery could be claimed by underperforming office workers.
[21][22][23][24][25][26] The Los Angeles Times also stated it had removed four Dilbert cartoons from its pages in the preceding nine months when they did not meet the newspaper's standards.
[23] In response, Adams announced that on March 16, 2023, he would launch Dilbert Reborn on the subscription website Locals, describing it as "spicier than the original".
[30] Dilbert portrays corporate culture as a Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy for its own sake, where office politics preclude productivity, employees' skills and efforts are not rewarded, and busy work is praised.
Until October 2014, he was usually depicted wearing a white dress shirt, black trousers and a red-and-black striped tie that inexplicably curved upward.
He is hopelessly incompetent at management, and he often tries to compensate for his lack of skills with countless group therapy sessions and business strategies that rarely bear fruit.
His brother is a demon named "Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light", and according to Adams, the pointy hair is intended to remind one of devil horns.
Like the Pointy-Haired Boss, Wally is utterly lacking in ethics and will take advantage of any situation to maximize his personal gain while doing the least possible amount of honest work.
This had the effect of causing this man—whom Adams describes as "one of the more brilliant people I've met"—to work hard at being incompetent, rude, and generally poor at his job to qualify for the buy-out program.
Yet despite his intelligence, ethics, and mystical powers, Asok sometimes takes advice from Wally in the arts of laziness, and from Dilbert in surviving the office.
He has been fired and killed numerous times (for example, being pushed down a flight of stairs and becoming possessed), in which case a new Ted is apparently hired.
Introduced in 2022, Dave is the strip's first black character, although he identifies as white, messing up the company's ESG and diversity scores, possibly deliberately, as it is not clear whether he is serious or not.
It represents the view that Americans have of any country that doesn't have cable television—we think they all wear fur hats and wallow around waist-deep in mud".
Ratbert was not originally intended to be a regular, instead being part of a series of strips featuring a lab scientist's cruel experiments.
Solomon describes the characters of Dilbert as dysfunctional, none of whom occupies a position higher than middle management, and whose inefficiencies detract from general corporate values such as productivity and growth.
In 1997, Tom Vanderbilt wrote in a similar vein in The Baffler magazine: Labor unions haven't adopted Dilbert characters as insignia.
He wrote, Long since psychically kidnapped by the gaudy, mindlessly hyperactive world of television, (readers) no longer demand or expect comic strips to be compelling, challenging, or even interesting.
[46] Dilbert says that the strip is "nothing but a clown with a small head who says random things", and Dogbert responds that he is "maintaining [his] artistic integrity by creating a comic that no one will enjoy.
The strip began as a specific parody of the comic book itself, set loosely within the office structure of Dilbert, with Hörnell doing an emulation of Adams's cartooning style.
[49] Adams has invited readers to invent words that have become popular among fans in describing their own office environments, such as induhvidual.
He acted in much the way that he portrays management consultants in the comic strip, with an arrogant manner and bizarre suggestions, such as comparing mission statements to broccoli soup.
He convinced the executives to change their existing mission statement for their New Ventures Group from "provide Logitech with profitable growth and related new business areas" to "scout profitable growth opportunities in relationships, both internally and externally, in emerging, mission-inclusive markets, and explore new paradigms and then filter and communicate and evangelize the findings".
[60] Joe Zabel stated that Dilbert had a large influence on many of the webcomics that followed it, establishing the "nerdcore" genre as it found its audience.
The second season's two-episode finale included Dilbert getting pregnant with the child of a cow, a hillbilly, robot DNA, "several dozen engineers", an elderly billionaire, and an alien, eventually ending up in a custody battle with Stone Cold Steve Austin as the Judge.
Ken Kwapis was announced as director, fresh off the heels of He's Just Not That Into You and directing several episodes for NBC's The Office.
[73] But in December 2017, in an interview by The Mercury News, Adams said that it would be impossible to make the film after his public support of Donald Trump.
David Steward, an employee of seven years, then posted on an office bulletin board the Dilbert strip[76] of October 26, 2007, that compared management decisions to those of "drunken lemurs".
However, an administrative law judge ruled in December 2007 that he would receive benefits, as his action was deemed as justified protest and not intentional misbehavior.
[81] The other guest artists were John Glynn, Eric Scott, Josh Shipley, Joel Friday, Donna Oatney and Brenna Thummler.