lot of black fans of the strip say can you add an African-American character? I would love to. I would love to. Do you think that I'm perfectly happy having a comic strip with a whole bunch of white people in it in 2020? Absolutely not. I am not happy with that. It isn't because the strip is designed to sort of mirror civilization and it doesn't. You know if you go to Silicon Valley or you can see a bunch of only white faces in the technical staff. No you are not. You're not gonna see only a bunch of white faces. You see the whole world represented there. So my strip is completely out of touch with the real world on diversity. I would love to fix that. Can I? No. We don't live in a world in which I can introduce a character easily who would be an African-American regular character and have any bad flaws. Because to make a comic character interesting they have to have flaws. It's the flaws that make it a comic.

You know Dilbert is socially inept and he's a little too trusting. He's gullible. You know he's got his flaws. Alice is angry and competitive and Wally's lazy. And Ashok, I tried to give Ashok the intern the least objectionable flaw. It's the smallest little flaw a human can have: inexperience because he's young. That's it. Ashok's only flaw is he's not yet very experienced because he's young. And still I almost got canceled for that little flaw.

So imagine me introducing a black character into the strip and I just think I'm gonna have a good time. I'm adding a little diversity trying to give people what they want and the first time that black character exhibits any kind of a flaw, doesn't matter what it is, I'm canceled. That's it. So that'