A bit late to the party, but this is something I want to say.

One inevitable reaction to #ScottAdams' downfall has been a lot of people saying "#Dilbert was always crap anyway." Maybe some of them are even telling the truth, as they see it. But I bet a lot of them aren't.

My skepticism is based on long experience: it's truly remarkable how *every single time* a celebrity turns out to be a horrible person, suddenly they never had a fan base at all. How they became celebrities in the first place must be one of those great unsolved mysteries. Nobody ever watched Mel Gibson, nobody ever read JK Rowling ... you get the idea.

Dilbert was once a sharp, funny look at office life in a particular time and place and circumstance. If you were a tech worker in the '90s, you instantly recognized the characters and situations. The Pointy-Haired Boss, in particular, crystallized a concept everyone knew but didn't quite have a name for. Adams could have gone the Watterson or Larson route, retired from cartooning and from public life around the turn of the century, and left a sterling legacy.

Voiceover: he did not, in fact, retire.

As his fortune grew and he got further away from the world he was lampooning, the quality of the strip declined. The characters became a collection of tics, the jokes were recycled over and over, and Dilbert himself became a kind of superhero—no longer deflecting corporate inanity in an almost-believable way, but challenging it head-on and *winning*. That's not satire. That's embarrassing auctorial wish-fulfillment. Pure Gary Stu.

This is a common problem with long-running comic strips whose humor depends on the characters being in a particular situation. ("Sitcomics," perhaps?) Beetle Bailey was once a biting lampoon of military life. Andy Capp was once a whistling-past-the-graveyard depiction of poverty in a dying industrial town. Mort Walker and Reg Smythe lived in the same worlds as their characters ... and then they didn't. No one should criticize them for enjoying their success, but it came with a price.

Neither Walker nor Smythe, as far as I know, went completely off the rails as human beings.

Had Adams kept his mouth shut, Dilbert would have kept running forever, becoming even more clichéd and unfunny, the same jokes recycled until they passed even out of catchphrase territory, yet another of those odd ghosts haunting the decaying mansion of newsprint, until the mansion itself crumbled to dust. Goth as fuck, really, when you think about it—a description I suspect Adams would angrily reject, which brings me a certain amount of glee.

Really, there's no excuse for it taking this long. Adams has been running his mouth for years, getting more repulsive all the while. *Even if* his work had maintained its original quality—which I think is flat-out impossible; see above—he should still have been far too radioactive to appear in any paper aimed at a general audience. His sexism and racism and MAGAtry no doubt play very well in certain quarters, but those quarters are home to vermin. No mass media outlet should cater to them, and those that do richly deserve to fail.

Also he drove his stepson to suicide, then tried to turn the tragedy into part of his industry. So there's that.

I do not for a minute believe his current shtick is "dementia," or "satire," or any of the other excuses his die-hard fans are making. (That's almost as common as "I never liked ___ even a little bit," when idols show their feet of clay.) It's all him. This is who he is now, and who he chose to be.

But I do hope it's not who he *always* was, I really do. And if I'm wrong, if he's been a monster his whole life and just used to be better at hiding it ... I'm not going to pretend I knew. That's all.