by Fred Seely
Editorial Director
Real estate reached the comic strips a decade ago when Lois Flagston became an agent and an unlikely addition came last month: Dilbert.
Every agent is familiar with Lois, who grew up as Beetle Bailey’s sister, married Hi Flagston, raised a family and, like so many, got her license.
But ... Dilbert?
While Hi and Lois are the All-American functional family, the characters that roam Dilbert are anything but that. They battle the daily war of survival in a dysfunctional marketplace with their idiotic pointy-headed boss and an array of outsiders determined to make their workplace lives miserable.
The workplace isn’t providing ideas like in the past, says artist Scott Adams, so he’s looking elsewhere and real estate has its foibles, too.
The recent week’s worth featured a dog named Dogbert, who appears in various guises - all evil - and this time took on the role of a fledgling real estate agent. The strips use the tried-and-untrue tales of how agents attempt to fool homebuyers.
“I recently bought some real estate,” said artist Scott Adams, who started Dilbert in 1988 and lives in California. “That’s what inspired it. I try to target professions that lots of people can relate to.
“Around here, there are more real estate agents than there are houses.”
Hi and Lois started in 1954 and there have been subtle changes over the years. The family now has microwaves, remote controls and cell phones, and Hi’s co-worker Thirsty has quietly been slipped into the background. When he appears, he’s minus his boozy red nose.
“We try to represent Lois as the modern woman who tries to do everything,” said Brian Walker, who writes the strip with brother Greg.
It’s easy for many agents to relate to the family - after all, America is full of households with a father who goes to an office and a mother who runs the house and sells real estate. Perhaps not that many mothers work that hard with a teenager, a set of preteen twins and a baby, but Lois manages to juggle the whole box of balls and still maintain a stylish look.
“I love the strip, even before Lois started doing real estate,” says Toy Scott of Norville Realty. “Most of them are ‘right on.’ Yes, I like her and don’t see how she has the time to do it all.”
Lois’s comic strip life started as an afterthought. Mort Walker started Beetle Bailey in 1950 when the nation was on a boom following World War II. Beetle was a lazy private and was assigned to Camp Swampy (he’s still a private and he’s still there) and went home on leave to visit his family. Walker introduced Beetle’s family and included his cute sister Lois.
The Lois character was so appealing to Walker that he decided to start a strip for her, too, and contacted another artist, Dik Browne, to see if he’d like to collaborate.
Today, Browne is gone but his name isn’t. The two families now are among the genre’s most famous with descendants of each involved with Beetle Bailey, Hi and Lois and another they started, Hagar the Horrible. Some write, some animate for the King Features strips.
Dilbert started live in an entirely different path. Adams was a cubicle-toiler in banks and daily watched the parade of idiosyncratic co-workers. He doodled out a lead character, added others based on his co-workers (“Alice” is a real person who now works for Cisco) and approached the United Media syndicate in 1988 with the idea. The strip went into syndication a year later.
(Adams wasn’t sold on the idea from the start; he kept his bank job until 1995.)
The strip kept its roots for almost a decade, making fun of the daily workplace foibles and consultants who would appear to counsel management on better ways of doing things.
But, the workplace changed.
“Remember when management books were all over the best-seller list and people used to quote from them like they were the word of God?” Adams asks. “You just can’t make fun of those books anymore because folks aren’t reading them like they used to.”
So other characters and other ideas were introduced.
“People used to think I took Dilbert out of the workplace because I ran out of ideas for him there,” Adams says. “Actually, I do as many workplace strips as I always did. It’s just that people’s perception of him changed.”
Both strips are among the most popular with each getting into over 2.000 newspapers worldwide including area newspapers such as The Florida Times-Union, which carries both, and the Financial News and Daily Record of Jacksonville, which has Dilbert.
