The toughest part about being a cartoonist is that every now and then I accidentally kill people. I claimed my first victim in the mid 90s, after an author put his name on a chapter from one of my books and submitted it to a magazine. During the ensuing legal wrangling, he had a heart attack and dropped dead. I heard from one of his angry friends that it was my fault because my complaints about his theft caused him unnecessary stress. I felt bad, but I also saved a bundle on legal bills.
Recently I killed thousands more people. I don’t have exact numbers yet. The problem stems from my comic that ran on 11-20-05, implying that retail stores might harvest organs from bad customers and sell them on eBay. I’ve received dozens of letters (long ones!) from very angry people who assure me that the Dilbert comic will reduce the number of organ donors. The concern is that people will think their parts will end up on eBay and so they won’t be inspired to donate.
This would only have an impact on exceptionally dumb potential organ donors. But as you know, that’s a large block of the general population. Now I have to wonder how many people are smart enough to read an entire Dilbert comic and still dumb enough to think that the first person on the scene of an accident might be there just to harvest organs for eBay. It can’t be more than 1%. Let’s see, we estimate 150 million people read Dilbert, so 1% would be 1.5 million. And only 10% of them might have donated an organ anyway, so I’m probably killing 150,000 people.
It’s times like this when “oops” doesn’t seem sufficient.
Normally I try to limit my killing to people who have it coming. But the people who need transplants often don’t fall into that category. So allow me to recommend that you fill out an organ donation card now. Otherwise you might be killing someone too, you bastard.