Comic Strip Review: Still Pumped from Using the Mouse

Comic Strip Review: Still Pumped from Using the Mouse by Scott Adams

Dilbert is an engineer who works for a poorly-managed mid-size corporation.  His co-workers are hostile, his boss is pointy-haired, and Dilbert himself is less than competent with anything other than engineering.  Such as dating.

The Dilbert gag-a-day comic strip has been running since 1989; this collection is of strips from 1992-1993.  While details of corporate culture have changed (one set of strips has Dilbert carrying a plethora of electronic devices that would now all be contained in his smartphone), much of its office-based humor is still relevant.  And funny.

Perhaps the most evocative sequence is a little girl named Noriko discovering how badly adults have messed up the world, and so her generation will have to spend most of their time working to fix the damage.  If Dilbert ran in real time, Noriko would be one of the Generation Y workers desperately trying to stay afloat now.

The art is…adequate; it’s easy to tell most of the named characters apart.  The strength is in the gags.  There’s a fair amount of sexism by Dilbert and his male co-workers; it can be difficult to tell how much of that is them being jerks, and how much the author’s now-outdated attitudes.  (Women are still under-represented in the engineering field, but not as badly as they used to be.)

Unsurprisingly, I found this volume in the lunchroom reading shelf at work, to which it will return so that others may enjoy it.  It’s certainly aged better than many of the trendy management fad books of the same era!