Comic strips Obituary

Scott Adams – RIP

Skip to comments

D. D. Degg Published: January 13, 2026 Updated: January 13, 2026 1 minute 2 comments

Dilbert cartoonist and libertarian influencer Scott Adams has passed away.

It is being reported that Scott Adams has lost his fight against cancer.

Scott Adams began his adult working career as an office worker for Crocker Bank (1979-1986) and Pacific Bell (1986-1995). It was at the latter that the idea for Dilbert was formed.

Dilbert began syndication with United Feature Syndicate on April 16, 1989 and while steadily gaining newspapers Adams still needed his day job for living expenses. On December 31, 1993 Adams added his internet address in the gutter of the comic strip. Adams has credited the resulting influx of comments and suggestions from readers helping the strip to be a more realistic and funny slice of cubicle life. The number of papers signing on to the strip began growing and when Bill Watterson ended Calvin and Hobbes at the end of 1995 Dilbert was the main beneficiary. In the year 2000 Dilbert joined Peanuts, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, and Blondie as the handful of comic strips that surpassed the 2,000 newspaper circulation mark.

In 2015 Adams began airing his political views, to the delight of some and the dismay of others. In time his growing audience of his podcasts took precedence over his comic strip readers. And soon his political views began infiltrating the comic strip. In 2022 Adams would claim that his politics was the reason Lee Enterprises dropped Dilbert. In February 2023 newspapers across the country, and soon after his syndicate, would drop Dilbert after Adams described Black Americans as “a hate group” and said “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the f*ck away.”

The last syndicated Dilbert, by then distributed by Andrews McMeel, ran in a few papers on March 26, 2023.

During those years Dilbert was published in an amazing number of best selling comic strip collections and Scott Adams authored many best selling advice books.

Before the last syndicated Dilbert appeared Adams had already begun the Dilbert Reborn webcomic on March 13, 2023. It was not Adams’ first webcomic, in 2015 he created the political Robots Read News.

Obituaries can be read at Variety, The New York Times (or here), The Washington Post (or here), The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle (Adams local major paper), The New York Post, and from conservative sites Townhall and Daily Caller, and from the liberal Raw Story.