Obscurity of the Day: Stockworth

 

When you read Dilbert have you ever wondered what the strip might be like if it was written from the perspective of the company's CEO? Well, wonder no longer, because Stockworth provided just such a strip, and did it almost a decade before Dilbert became the phenomenon of the 1990s. 

Stockworth was a strip about the CEO of a non-specific corporation, and he deals with fools, pests and irritants all the way up and down the org-chart, not to mention stockholders, journalists and customers. The strip is a little more genteel and grounded in reality than Dilbert, as befits the view from the top down instead of the bottom up. But when the strip hit its marks it was just like Dilbert -- not just funny, but very insightful about the corporate world. 

You would think that a strip about big business would be distributed through the corporate syndication channel, but Stockworth came into being as a self-syndicated strip. It was created by two business consultants, Hinda Sterling (art) and Herb L. Selesnick (writing), and was initially sold as a feature for the Boston Globe, debuting there August 2 1982. A year later the creators signed up for distribution through the New York Times Syndication Sales company, basically a black hole from whence no comic strip can ever become a success. After being distributed by that company from August 29 1983* to October 13 1984** with little to show for it, Sterling and Selesnick returned to the realm of self-syndication. They stuck with the do-it-yourself route for at least another year and a half until March 18 1986** before throwing in the towel, or at least losing the last paper I can find running it. 

The strip was collected in book form three years later, as Stockworth: An American CEO, once again self-published. If you have an interest in business humor from the perspective of the head honcho, I highly recommend it.

* Source: Boston Globe

** Source: Belleville News-Democrat