In the category of career implosions for a major American cultural figure, the downfall of Scott Adams has been especially swift and spectacular.
The Northern California cartoonist’s “Dilbert” comic strip, long one of the most popular in the country and appearing in more than 2,000 newspapers at its peak, all but vanished by Monday after he called Black people “a hate group” in an incendiary diatribe on race relations in America last week.
First, hundreds of newspapers — including The Mercury News and East Bay Times, Washington Post, Orange County Register, Los Angeles Times and those in USA Today Network — canceled the strip. Then Andrews McMeel Universal, the company that syndicates “Dilbert,” said it would no longer work with the cartoonist. Adams told the Bay Area News Group on Monday that the publisher of his books on career and life advice had canceled his upcoming and backlisted works, as well.
