FUNNY MAN: Scott Adams

Scott Adams’s comic strip Dilbert — about an engineer and his work life in a large corporation — is published in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries and in 25 languages. However, despite the abiding popularity of Dilbert and that of a few other iconic comic strips such as Peanuts, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes or Beatle Bailey, the newspaper comic strip seems to be a dying institution. In recent years, newspapers have been cutting back on the space given to comic strips. Some blame the Internet for the decline. Says Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, “I believe the main cause for decline is the Internet. It has also opened the door for self publishing. For example, we have offered the Garfield strip as a daily delivery right to a person’s desktop, and it’s been very popular. We also offer it as an app for smart phones.” Others say the cartoonist’s profession is simply not lucrative enough today. Scott Adams, however, has his own take on the status of newspaper comic strips. In an email interview, he speaks to Abimanyu Nagarajan about the future of the institution and about his own evolution into a famous cartoonist

• The quick version is that at age 30, after years in banking and then the phone company, I solicited some advice from a cartoonist I had seen on television (Jack Cassady). He had a TV show about how to become a cartoonist. I didn’t see the show, but wrote him a letter asking how I could get into the business. He wrote back with advice about which books to read, including a book of publishers’ addresses and requirements. I bought the books, drew some comics, and sent them off to a few major magazines. They rejected my comics and I gave up for a year. One day I got a second letter from Cassady. He said he was writing just to make sure I hadn’t given up. This inspired me to try again, this time to become a syndicated cartoonist in newspapers. I sent my samples of what I called “Dilbert” to several syndication companies. One of them, United Media, liked what they saw and offered me a contract. That’s how it started.

• Sadly, it’s no longer a field with much of a future. Comics are usually among the most popular items in newspapers, but the newspaper industry itself is shrinking. And newspapers have been cutting back on the space allocated for comics, as well as everything else, for years. Newspapers in paper form might survive another 10 years. After that, they will live on the Net forever in some ever-evolving form.

• I think young adults prefer edgier material than what is found in newspaper comics today. Television and movies have evolved to fit the changing tastes of young adults, but newspapers are a “family” media and found their standards for humour content stuck in the G-rated Fifties.

• I’m not a newspaper historian, but I noticed the drop off in the mid-Nineties. Dilbert has been insulated from most of the decline because the last newspapers standing in most major markets have kept Dilbert. And by contract we sold it to only one paper in each major market anyway.

• Unless the last three newspapers in the United States are The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The New York Times (none carry comic strips), there will be new newspaper comics as long as there are newspapers.

• I can write it in a few minutes if I have an idea in mind. It takes an hour or two to finish the art. And I do a lot of rewriting of the words as I go. I draw directly on the computer these days, using a special Wacom screen that I can write to with a stylus. It’s twice as fast as the old paper-and-pen days.

• I was born and raised in a tiny town named Windham in the mountains of upstate New York. Most of the town was destroyed recently by a flood from Hurricane Irene. My father, age 84, still lives in that town, but his home is above the flood zone.

• I graduated at the top of my small class of 40 kids, and was generally viewed as brainy. But I played enough sports and got in just enough trouble to avoid the nerd label.

My most interesting memory of those years is that adults often identified me as someone who would be famous some day. It was a strange thing to hear as a kid, but I believed it. Or perhaps I believed it first and they picked up on my confidence. But either way, the sense of destiny has always been palpable for me.

I was the middle child and was my mother’s favourite, probably because I didn’t cause trouble at home, got good grades, and we had a similar sense of humour. We laughed a lot in our family.

• My favourite sports were tennis, ping pong, basketball, soccer and softball. I was good at games that didn’t require too much size or bulk. My hobbies included tinkering with Erector sets and electronics, and various art projects involving balsa wood, clay and anything I could draw on. My reading was mostly limited to comic books.

I have been compulsively creative for as long as I can remember. When I was very young I thought I would be either an inventor or a cartoonist when I grew up. As I got older, and more practical, I thought I would be a lawyer or a businessman. My undergraduate degree was in economics, and I later got an MBA from Berkeley. Interestingly, all of those skills go into my cartooning career. You’d be amazed how many legal contracts and business decisions and, in a sense — inventions, go into my job.

• I used to make drawings of my teachers and classmates, generally in humorous or obscene poses. When I threw away the drawings, classmates sometimes retrieved them from the trash, unwrinkled them, and told me they would keep them in case I became famous some day. So my guess is that my success wasn’t as much of a surprise.

• I would recommend creating comics that work on the Internet, which means edgier material and those aimed at younger readers. Work on the writing first and artwork second. Artists are a dime a dozen. Funny writers are rare.