Dilbert : Always Postpone Meetings With Time-Wasting Morons
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Graphic Design
Dilbert : Always Postpone Meetings With Time-Wasting Morons Details
A cartoon book featuring the vulnerable and socially challenged Dilbert, an engineer who struggles to cope with the rigours and stresses of everyday life. He lives with Dogbert, his megalomaniac dog, and his two dinosaurs, Bob and Dawn. Dilbert features in nearly 200 newspapers worldwide. Read more
Reviews
This is the first compilation (of dozens) of Dilbert newspaper comic strips. The book is 111 pages long, and includes the first six months of Dilbert comics, from April through October of 1989.As other reviewers have mentioned, there are very few strips set in the office. Now-familiar characters such as the pointy-haired boss, Wally, Alice, Catbert and Asok are not seen at all. A prototype of the pointy-haired boss (who does not have pointy hair and is not Dilbert's boss) appears in just one strip on page 66. Oddly, some of these characters are seen in the book's cover illustration despite the fact that they're nowhere to be found in the inside pages.Most of these early strips are about Dilbert and Dogbert, and the personalities of both characters are almost in place. Dilbert is a nerd with poor social skills who women find unappealing. In one strip, a woman calls Dilbert on the phone to tell him that IF he were to ask her out, her answer would be a definite no.Yet Dilbert has a lot of intelligence with technology. Dilbert discovers a tiny civilization under a microscope, and invents some offbeat devices; including a trans-dimensional radio, a booby-trapped doormat that can fling burglars three blocks away, a trash compacter that can compact two tons of trash into one brick. While doing some calculations on his home computer, he calculates that it's not possible for all the dinosaurs to be extinct. His calculations turn out to be correct, and he immediately discovers two dinosaurs that had been hiding in his home. (The two dinosaurs, Bob and Dawn, would become recurring characters later on.)However, there are a few occasions in these early strips when Dilbert is seen as gullible and even stupid. (For instance, he misinterprets a sign that reads "End construction" as being a protest sign in opposition to construction.) This is out of character for Dilbert as we know him today.As for Dogbert, he is very much the same as always. Dogbert has always exploited gullible people to make easy money. (In later years he would regularly work as a high-priced consultant for the Pointy-Haired Boss, who is too dumb to realize how useless Dogbert's advice really is.) The essence of Dogbert is all totally in place in one of these early strips in which Dogbert tells Dilbert that he is writing a self-help book for compulsive shoppers. Dilbert says "What do you know about compulsive shoppers?" Dogbert replies, "I know they buy a lot of books."Most of these early Dilbert cartoons are funny, and even at this early stage the strip was quirky and original. Most Dilbert fans will enjoy this book so long as they know not to expect the office-based gags and satire of corporate politics that was to distinguish Dilbert in subsequent years.PROS:1: It's funny.2: It's significantly different from any newspaper strip that came before it.3: The strips are all in consecutive order, and none of them are skipped over.CONS:It's too short. There are only 111 pages, and all the Sunday strips are needlessly enlarged to fill two pages. The Sunday strips would have still been readable if they were printed smaller to fit on single pages, which in turn would have allowed room for more material within the same number of pages.