The Friday Fun Dilbert Archive
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon strip, died from cancer in January 2026. In his later years, he had become something of a controversial character, eventually leading to the strip being dropped by his syndicator and publishers in February 2023.
This isn't an attempt to defend Adams or his opinions, some of which bordered on racist and others were clearly absurd. But, for a long period of time from the early 1990s through to the mid 2010s, before he started to head off into the realms of fantasy and conspiracy theories, Dilbert was essential daily reading for almost anyone in any kind of IT related role.
One of the consequences of Adams's fall from grace, and his untimely death, is that there is no official, readily available archive of all the Dilbert cartoons. The original archive at dilbert.com was lost when the syndicator pulled the plug, and Adams never recreated it when he restarted the strip at his new website. The entire collection has been preserved at the Internet Archive, but this isn't particularly accessible for casual browsing. At the time of writing, the original images still exist on the syndicator's website (see, for example, the first syndicated Dilbert), but there's no guarantee that they will be there for ever. And the image URLs are - deliberately, I presume - unguessable, making it impossible to link to them without a database of their locations.
Unofficial archives do, though, exist. A full, downloadable copy of all of the original images can be accessed at https://pastebin.com/YayLHMMZ. And there's a full directory of every comic, together with a lot of useful metadata, at https://github.com/jvarn/dilbert-archive - the data of which supports the author's own archive site at https://varnham.net/dilbert-archive. There's also a one-page display of every comic at https://ecstrema.github.io/dilbert/. And there's a somewhat unstructured collection at Scribd.
Neither the varnham.net nor the ecstrema.github.io sites host the images themselves. The former hotlinks to the Internet Archive images, the latter to the originals at Andrews McNeel.
However, there are issues with that. The first is that there's no guarantee that the hotlinked images will continue to be available. In particular, it's entirely plausible that Andrews McNeel will, at some stage, simply delete all the old Dilbert images from their servers. The Internet Archive images are more likely to stick around, but their servers can get overloaded at times. And when they do, an image hotlinked from them won't appear.
Also, hotlinking images from another website is, generally, considered a Bad Thing in the Internet world because it's sucking up someone else's resources without giving them anything in return. It feels particularly wrong to use the Internet Archive as a hotlink source, given that it's often under heavy load anyway.
So, I've decided to create another unofficial archive which avoids those problems. I've taken the images from the downloadable archive at Pastebin, and converted them to webp (because that's a better format, these days, than gif). And then added a couple of pages to Friday Fun, one which displays individual comics by date - thus creating a full archive - and another which displays all of the comics which were published on this day in the past.
So if you go to the daily page now, you'll see all the comics originally published on 12th February, through all the years that the syndicated strip ran. I personally find this a fascinating way to view the archives, because you can see the evolution of Dilbert and his companions over the years. But if you want to follow a particular story arc, you'll need to come back to the page each day, just like you would when the comics were originally published.
This is, of course, completely unauthorised, just like every other unofficial archive. At the moment, I'm reasonably confident that the strip's syndicators have no intention of resurrecting their own archive, so I'm not treading on their toes. And Scott Adams is dead, so he no longer has an opinion. Rights in the cartoons have, presumably, passed to his heirs, although who that is isn't immediately obvious. But it's not implausible that they may, at some point, want to create their own official Dilbert archive.
I have absolutely no intention of competing with an official Dilbert archive, if and when it should ever be created. If that does happen, I'll simply close this one down. The point of this archive is to simply to provide an accessible way of viewing the cartoons online, for the benefit of people who, like me, have fond memories of their own life in IT and the part that Dilbert played in reflecting our lives with humour. It has no purpose other than that.
In the meantime, if the current rightsholders are unhappy with the existence of this unofficial archive, then I'm only an email away. Contact details are on this website's About Friday Fun page.
Oh, and if you want to read more about Scott Adams and Dilbert, this article by Scott Alexander is absolutely brilliant.
