WASHINGTON, Jan 13 (Reuters) – “Dilbert” comic strip creator Scott Adams, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump whose career flagged after a racist rant, died on Tuesday, his wife said. He was 68.

Shelly Miles announced Adams’ passing in an online livestream in which she read a final message from the artist, whose strip lampooned life in the cubicle farms of corporate America, framed around its titular character, an engineer known for his glasses and perennially bent tie.

Adams had posted on X about his decline from metastatic prostate cancer and made a direct appeal to Trump to get his healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente of Northern California, to schedule treatment with the targeted radiotherapy drug Pluvicto.

“On it,” Trump responded in a November 2 social media post. 

On Tuesday, the Republican president noted the cartoonist’s passing on Truth Social.

“Sadly, the Great Influencer, Scott Adams, has passed away. He was a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn’t fashionable to do so. He bravely fought a long battle against a terrible disease,” Trump wrote.

The “Dilbert” comic strip was first published in 1989 and ran for decades. At its peak, it was one of the most widely circulated comic strips in the U.S., but many newspapers dropped it in 2023 after a racist rant by Adams appeared on YouTube.

Adams called Black Americans a “hate group” and suggested white Americans “get the hell away from Black people,” in response to a conservative organization’s poll purporting to show that many African-Americans do not think it is OK to be white.

He later said that his comments were intended as hyperbole and that he disavowed racists, and said that media reports had ignored the context of his comments.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; editing by Scott Malone and Sharon Singleton)

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