The promised retrospective on the death of Dilbert creator Scott Adams is now up at the Everyman

As a child of the 90s, I grew up reading Dilbert. The world-famous comic was my introduction to the corporate world, and I had been laughing over it from long before I was old enough and aware enough to even understand half the concepts, let alone to have any experience of corporate life. For me, Dilbert has always been there as a tentpole of my imaginative landscape. Characters, lines, and images from the strip serve as reference points in my brain to this very day (“You need a new kybard? What’s a kybard?” “JUST SIGN THE STUPID THING!”). A great deal of my own sense of humor was formed by the dry, sarcastic wit of the Dilbert cast.

The strip was a deeply cynical and deadly accurate skewering of modern corporate bureaucracy, centered around a hapless engineer named Dilbert who works for a nameless and soulless company alongside coworkers Alice (overachieving and underappreciated) and Wally (the slacker to end all slackers), under the oversight of their utterly imbecilic Pointy-Haired Boss. Meanwhile, Dilbert’s machiavellian mutt, Dogbert, uses his genius intellect and utter lack of moral standards to run circles around everyone else while acquiring vast wealth and power (“We’ll start with an exercise about trust. I want all of you to sign blank checks and give them to me”).

It was one of the most popular and influential newspaper comics of all time, practically synonymous with corporate life in the millennial era. There was a time when the only way one could enter an office without seeing Dilbert and co. taped to every cubicle wall was if company policy forbad the comic…a situation noted and lampooned in the strip itself (“They’re not even funny!” “This one has our business plan”).

And now it is over. Dilbert has retired at last, and there will never be another comic. Scott Adams has passed away at the age of 68, following a battle with prostate cancer.

Read the rest here.