Dilbert's subject matter "strikes a nerve," as Newsweek's cover story shouted in August of 1996, because it "portrays the bedrock truth of the American workplace, at least in the white-collar caverns where clerks, engineers, marketers, and salespeople dwell." This comic strip presents aspects of the corporate culture that veterans of the cubicle easily identify with: company monitoring of employee e-mail; management double talk; carpal tunnel syndrome; endless and pointless meetings; inane team-building exercises; and lower back pains resulting from excessive hours in front of the computer screen. Since his initial appearance in the early 1990s as the brain-child of MBA-trained former Pacific Bell software engineer Scott Adams, Dilbert, a nerdy engineer and the strip's main character, has become a sort of corporate everyman.

The strip centers around an anonymous company where Dilbert is employed in an unnamed department. With co-workers, he struggles to meet deadlines, withstand management...