It's amazing to me that South Park can create an entire 30 minute animated cartoon and get it on the air in under a week (which is how they can remain so completely topical), yet it takes 30 days to get your strips into production. That just doesn't make sense. I think a lot of us would enjoy the topicality enough to forgoe the "continuity of story" that you mention, too.

EMU wrote:

"You really need to talk to your publishers. There ought to be an easy (for you) way to publish cartoons pertaining to actual events. "

ahhh, isn't it called editorial cartoons?

Since there's no mashup, I'm just going to offer my revised punchline:

"How do you sleep at night?"

"The servants help with that. The super-models, not as much."

I watched 15 mins of the Goldman Sachs hearing and it made me sick... all the righteous senators and their brow beating. They were like how could you think that the housing market will go down and not tell everyone? Yea, the whole thing about some people thinking it would go up forever and the fact that all the other banks really were performing some devious accouting (especially Lehman) made it to the point where even if Goldman said "these might decrease in value" a lot of people would've disagreed and taken the other side of the trade. It's ridiculous that they're being blamed for realizing before almost anyone what was going on. Personally, I think the government has a weak case against Goldman... they'd fare better against some of the other banks.

Wished this comic could be published... I think it would still be relevant in a couple months, this financial "reform" will be going on for quite some time.

If there is anything I enjoy almost as much as your cartoons it is the comments your fans submit on this Blog. It is refreshing to go to a site such as yours and discover such a fraternity of like-minded (well, maybe not minded) folks who enjoy the humor and irony of our society, business, and life itself. Way to go.

Too late, I'm getting used to it already.

You really need to talk to your publishers. There ought to be an easy (for you) way to publish cartoons pertaining to actual events.

I registered to comment. I don't like this strip for only one reason.

Dogbert's tail is not wagging. That is a deal breaker for me.

Otherwise, excellent.

"Is real life patterned after Dilbert comic strip characters? "

Yes. The Dilbert Principle is one of the main business manuals in both large corporations and political groups, who see it as a series of guidelines rather than a description of idiocies.
It's in good company too, there are people who use Mein Kampf as an instruction manual for running corporations (as was revealed last year, when publication figures of the book in India were traced back to several university MBA level courses).

So Scott, since you are now fabulously famous, wealthy etc. already, why don't you take control of your own product and publish it on the Internet whenever you feel like it, with whatever content you like (avoiding editorial censorship etc.) then you can be more topical, get more traffic to your site, make more money there.

Meanwhile the dinosaur Newspaper industry, which has rapidly dwindling subscriber counts anyway, will probably still want to publish Dilbert, and it will still be on the same schedule, but it will have come out on the Internet first, so they won't have to pay as much for it, which helps them. They can just skip the strips that contain things they don't like, but you won't care.

I don't remember the last time I bought a newspaper.

How did Dogbert get this way? Is he the reincarnation of some historical stinker, such as Machiavelli or Anrold-Amalric ... or Attila the Hound?

I think this comic will never go stale. You could trot it out every 3 to 5 years as the occassion arises. That seems to be roughly the interval between unprecedented, never happened before, financial scandals.

Why is it that Doonesbury seems to have a shorter publication window? I've seen topics come up there that seem only a week or two old? Is Garry Trudeau on a shorter leash?

Love the strip though. Dogbert is my secret hero.

The sad thing is that I don't think this comic actually will go out of date in a month, or a year, or a decade ...

United Media is missing a great opportunity. Surely the technology exists to make the process much faster than a month.

What some of you seem to be failing to understand about this strip is that Congress FORCED GS to offer this "crappy" product, and then, months later. decided to ROAST them for developing a product that gained on failure of the product Congress FORCED them to offer to their customers. Simply, it's a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't.

qazwart,

how come guys like David Carradine end up dead with glad storage bags tied around their head and guys like Lord Blankfein keep breathing? (I just threw that in for free. You can take credit.)

You should possibly publish a separate but equal editorial cartoon. These strips are good enough to eat (when warm) and I am certain that they could be syndicated to newspapers that Think Like You and Me.