The Boondocks (comic strip)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Boondocks
Boondocks cast. Clockwise from top: Huey Freeman, Michael Caesar, Hiro Otomo, Riley Freeman, Cindy McPhearson and Jazmine DuBois
Author(s)Aaron McGruder
Illustrator(s)Aaron McGruder
Jennifer Seng (2003–2004)
Carl Jones (2004–2006)
Current status/scheduleConcluded daily strip
Launch dateFebruary 8, 1996
Publisher(s)Three Rivers Press
Andrews McMeel Publishing
Genre(s)Satire

The Boondocks was a daily

African American culture and American politics as seen through the eyes of young, African American radical Huey Freeman. McGruder's syndicate said it was among the biggest launches the company ever had.[2]

Publication history

The strip debuted on Hitlist.com

University of Maryland newspaper The Diamondback[3] under editor-in-chief Jayson Blair[4] on December 3, 1996, paying McGruder $30 per strip—$17 more than other cartoonists. McGruder ended the strip's run in The Diamondback on March 18, 1997, two weeks after the strip was omitted due to a technical error and a Diamondback staffer printed the word "OOPS" in its place without an explanation. He pulled the strip after the paper refused to run an apology.[5] (Upon the revelation in 2004 of news article fabrications by Blair, by then a reporter for The New York Times
, McGruder's comic strip joined others in lampooning Blair.)

The strip was rejected by six syndicates — including the

Washington Post Writers Group, Creators Syndicate, United Media, and Chronicle Features — before finally being picked up. Many of the syndicates that rejected the strip were supportive but felt that The Boondocks was "too edgy." An article from the summer of 1997 asserted that Universal Press Syndicate (UPS) was taking a "hard look" at the strip; UPS eventually picked it for syndication in April 1999.[6]

In Fall 2003,

Jennifer Seng assumed art duties from McGruder. In an interview with The New Yorker, McGruder said, "If something had to give, it was going to be the art. I think I'm a better writer than artist."[4] Carl Jones succeeded Seng as illustrator in late 2004. In the introduction to the collection Public Enemy #2, McGruder wrote, "I had hired an artist to help me on some of the art duties. People think I stopped drawing the strip, but that's never been the case. To this day there has never been a single Boondocks strip that I did not personally touch—I still obsess over the details of Huey, Riley, Caesar and Granddad. I still go over every panel. I still care what it looks like, and I always will."[7]

On February 28, 2006, McGruder announced that his strip would go on a six-month hiatus, starting March 27, 2006, with new installments resuming in October. Repeats of earlier strips were offered by Universal Press Syndicate in the interim.[8] The Boondocks was syndicated to over 300 clients at its peak, but more than half substituted different features rather than publish reruns during the hiatus.[9][10] On September 25, 2006, Universal Press Syndicate president Lee Salem announced that the comic would not return, saying, "Although Aaron McGruder has made no statement about retiring or resuming The Boondocks for print newspapers ... newspapers should not count on it coming back in the foreseeable future." He added that Universal would welcome McGruder back if he chose to return.[11] Greg Melvin, McGruder's editor at the syndicate, met with him in an unsuccessful attempt to talk the cartoonist into returning. McGruder cited his work on the show among other projects as reasons for not then returning to the strip.[12] After the strip was canceled, reruns continued to be carried by some newspapers through November 26, 2006.[13] Reruns of the strip are available online at GoComics.[14]

In February 2019, a series of one-shot strips were published on radio personality Charlamagne tha God's Instagram page.[15]

Description

The strip depicts Huey Freeman and his younger brother Riley, two young children who have been moved out of the West Side of Chicago with their grandfather Robert to live with him in the predominantly white fictional suburb of Woodcrest (in Maryland, as seen from the area code stated in the March 16, 2000 strip). This relates to McGruder's childhood move from Chicago to Columbia, a diverse Maryland suburb. The title word "boondocks" alludes to the isolation from primarily African-American urban life that the characters feel, and permits McGruder some philosophical distance.

Huey is a politically perceptive devotee of black radical ideas of the past few decades (as explained in the May 4, 1999 strip, Huey is in fact named after

civil rights activist
who is offended by both their values and ideas.

Huey's best friend is

DA Thomas DuBois (a reference both to Uncle Tom and W. E. B. Du Bois
) and his white wife Sarah, also a lawyer. Their young daughter Jazmine is very insecure about her ethnic identity and is often the subject of Huey's antipathy for being out of touch with her African ancestry.

The Boondocks was very political and occasionally subject to great controversy, usually sparked by the comments and behavior of its main character, Huey. The comic strip has been withheld by newspapers several times. In this respect, it is similar to Doonesbury. In particular, the principal characters often discussed racial and American socio-economic class issues. Because of its controversy and serious subject matter, many newspaper publishers either moved the strip to the op-ed section of the paper, pulled more potentially controversial strips from being published, didn't publish the strip at all, or canceled it altogether. Similar reactions have been faced by other strips, such as Doonesbury.

Main characters

Minor characters

  • Hiro Otomo – One of Huey's friends, a young Japanese-American DJ. Hiro only appeared in the original Diamondback version of the strip.
  • Principal Williams – The principal of J. Edgar Hoover Elementary. An out-of-touch white man who prepared for the arrival of Huey and Riley by renting several blaxploitation films, mistakenly thinking of them as representative of black culture. He somehow has access to FBI files of Huey.
  • John Petto – Huey, Cindy, and Caesar's white teacher, who is as clueless about how to handle them as the principal is. Old-fashioned and not used to black people, he is intimidated by Huey's intellect and has struggled trying to debate with Huey during class.
  • Mrs. Peterson – Riley's teacher, who has a strict rule of giving her students no special treatment, where they must pull their weight or fail. Because of this, she once failed a girl from Romania, who was a math genius, but could barely read or write. Before she started teaching, she was originally a nun, then she worked in three maximum-security prisons. Mrs. Peterson has little patience for Riley and his street behavior.
  • Flagee and Ribbon
  • Psycho Star Wars Guy

Controversies

The content of McGruder's comic strip often came under fire for being politically left-wing and occasionally risqué, leading to its being published in the

September 11, 2001 attacks with a series of strips in which Huey calls a government tipline to report Ronald Reagan for funding terrorism. Soon after, he "censored" several strips by featuring a talking patriotic yellow ribbon
and a flag (named Ribbon and Flagee, respectively) instead of the usual cast.

Several strips have been briefly pulled from prominent publications.[18][19][20] For example, the "Condi Needs a Man" strip, in which Huey and his friend Caesar create a personal ad for U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, portraying her as a "female Darth Vader type that seeks loving mate to torture", resulted in The Washington Post withholding a week's worth of strips, the longest such suspension ever by the paper. However, the paper's ombudsman, Michael Getler, later sided with McGruder.[21] The Post also declined to run "Can a Nigga Get a Job?", which had black contestants compete on a reality TV show to work for Russell Simmons, only to find that all the contestants were rude and lazy.[22]

McGruder has often attacked Black conservative commentator Larry Elder in the comic strip as well as the television series. In response, Elder published an opinion piece in which he created the "McGruder", an award for statements made by black public figures that Elder considers "dumb", "vulgar", and/or "offensive".[23]

Collected editions

The comic strips have been collected into trade paperbacks:

  • 2000: Because I Know You Don't Read the Newspaper (incl. Apr. 19, 1999 – Jan. 29, 2000 strips)
  • 2001: Fresh for '01...You Suckas! (incl. Jan. 30, 2000 – Nov. 5, 2000 strips)
  • 2003: A Right to Be Hostile (Treasury)
  • 2005: Public Enemy #2 (incl. Mar. 12, 2003 – Nov. 13, 2004 strips)
  • 2007: All the Rage (incl. Dec. 1, 2004 – Dec. 31, 2005 strips)

See also

  • The Boondocks (2005 TV series)

References

  1. ^ Raphael Satter (November 5, 2002). "Boondocks creator talks about comic strip". The Chicago Maroon. Retrieved April 23, 2015.
  2. ^ Tom Heintjes (November 8, 2013). "Universal Soldier: The Lee Salem Interview". Hogan's Alley. Retrieved April 23, 2015.
  3. ^ a b "The Boondocks" (PDF). UClick.com. Andrews McMeel Universal. Archived from the original (PDF) on July 4, 2012. Retrieved October 17, 2016.
  4. ^ a b McGrath, Ben (April 12, 2004). "The Radical". The New Yorker. Retrieved February 2, 2006.
  5. ^ Litten, Kevin, "A little Huey himself" Archived November 10, 2012, at the Wayback Machine. The Diamondback, November 7, 2005. Retrieved December 3, 2006.
  6. ^ Parker, Lonnae O'Neal. "STRIP TEASE," Washington Post (August 20, 1997).
  7. ISBN 978-1400082582
  8. ^ Hanashiro, Robert (February 28, 2006). "Comic strip 'The Boondocks' taking six-month hiatus". USA Today.
  9. ^ Astor, Dave (September 27, 2006). "Colleagues praise 'Boondocks', aren't surprised it may have ended". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on January 14, 2009.
  10. ^ "McGruder Stopped Doing 'Boondocks' Because He 'Was Sick of It'". November 21, 2006. Archived from the original on November 29, 2006.
  11. ^ Stepp, Laura Sessions (September 26, 2006). "Syndicate Says Boondocks May Not Return". The Washington Post.
  12. ^ "Return of 'Boondocks' comic strip delayed". CNN. September 25, 2006. Archived from the original on September 27, 2006.
  13. ^ "The Boondocks Comic Strip Ends This November". September 26, 2006. Archived from the original on October 23, 2006.
  14. ^ "The Boondocks". GoComics. Retrieved February 2, 2012.
  15. ^ "ICYMI: Aaron McGruder Resurrects 'The Boondocks' Just in Time". ColorLines. 8 February 2019. Retrieved June 12, 2019.
  16. ^ McGruder, Aron (May 4, 1999). "The Boondocks – May 04, 1999 strip". Retrieved April 19, 2013.
  17. ^ "Huey P. Newton". FamousAfricanAmericans.org. Retrieved March 1, 2021.
  18. ^ Shipp, E. R. "On 'The Boondocks'", The Washington Post (Apr. 9, 2000).
  19. ^ Valby, Karen. "A political cartoonist is banned in New York: Boondocks' Aaron McGruder loses his Daily News gig," Entertainment Weekly (Oct. 19, 2001).
  20. ^ McGrath, Ben. The Radical: Why do editors keep throwing "The Boondocks" off the funnies page?", The New Yorker (April 12, 2004).
  21. ^ Getler, Michael (October 19, 2003). "Putting 'The Boondocks' in the Dock". The Washington Post.
  22. ^ Holtzclaw, Mike. "'BOONDOCKS' STIRS UP CONTROVERSY," Daily Press (Sept. 20, 2004).
  23. ^ Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey Jones, Ethan Thompson. New York University Press, April 2009. p. 271.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to The Boondocks (comic strip).
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Boondocks_(comic_strip)&oldid=1218857242"