Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons
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| Dilbert Book |
| "Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons" | |
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| Book No.: | 2 |
| Dates: | April 16, 1989 - October 21 |
| Published: | January 1994 |
| Author: | Scott Adams |
Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons is the 1st Dilbert collection of daily strips, but is the 2nd Dilbert book to be published. It features 6 months of Dilbert comic strips and an introduction by Scott Adams. Its genre is humour. It sells at the retail price of £6.99 in the UK. It originally sold for $7.95 in the USA.
[edit] Plot
The book introduces the characters of Dilbert, a semi-successful engineer and amateur scientist, and his pet dog, Dogbert, a megalomaniac Beagle with ambitions of world domination. Unlike later strips, which de-emphasize Dilbert as the main character and focus primarily on corporate culture and office life, these early strips feature hardly any of Dilbert's life as an engineer. Rather, the main source of humor comes from Dilbert's nerdiness, social ineptitude, and inability to form meaningful relationships. Some surrealist strips--including one in which Dilbert and Dogbert are magically transported to a land populated by men in togas who speak only in cliches-- are demonstrative of a style which Adams completely abandoned within the strip's first year.
In addition to narrative differences, Adams' drawing style was, at this point, still highly reminiscent of a series of doodles, especially the Sunday strips, many of which have large, amorphous blobs as the background, representing machines in Dilbert's lab. Also of note:
- Dogbert is smaller and considerably more spherical here
- Dilbert is shaped significantly different; his head is much taller and thinner than it would later become, and he is depicted as being morbidly obese
- Dilbert's boss, in his earliest incarnation, lacks the childlike face and pointed haircut that would later come to characterize him. Here, he is depicted as an old man with stooped shoulders, a heavy forehead which hangs over his eyes, and large, flabby jowls.
- For the Sunday strip dated July 30, 1989 where Dilbert discovers the small planet "Minimus 6", in the first panel Dilbert appears to be drawn with a mouth, as there is a small line under Dilbert's nose. But, when this Sunday strip appears in later compilation books such as "Seven Years of Highly Defective People", the "mouth line" is removed.
