Aaron McGruder, former Chicago South Side resident, hip-hop enthusiast,
Star Wars fanatic, cartoonist, and creator of the popular comic strip
The Boondocks, returned to Chicago as an honored guest. The University
of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
hosted McGruder (Nov. 1) in front of a full house eager to hear him speak
and ask questions.
McGruder’s comic strip, as well as his career, feasts on contradiction.
Whether he’s satirizing white suburbia or poking fun at leaders
like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and President Bush, his words and images
confront stereotypes, taboos, and plain stupidity. McGruder’s work
is so inflammatory that it gets more attention, one strip at a time. Enough,
in fact, to get certain series pulled from newspapers around the country.
McGruder began his comic strip as a student at the University of Maryland,
where he was an African-American studies major. From the school’s
student newspaper, McGruder took the strip to the National Association
of Black Journalists’ annual conference, where he was given invaluable
advice. In 1999, McGruder’s cartoon strip, The Boondocks, would
have the second largest launch ever for a comic, running in over 150 newspapers
across the country (the Universal Press Syndicate had hoped for 30 to
50 papers).
The idea for The Boondocks came to McGruder in 1994 or 1995 when he realized
“that there was this void in the social and political discourse.
… I really like to make fun of people and no one was making fun
of the people I wanted to make fun of.”
The strip has an ensemble cast of characters, but most of the action centers
on Huey Freedman, a pre-teen black revolutionary, and Riley Freedman (AKA
Riley Escobar), Huey’s little brother and an aspiring thug. The
two brothers move from Chicago’s South Side to an overwhelmingly
white suburb to live with their Southern grandfather. There’s also
a biracial classmate, Jazmine DuBois, who denies having an afro and claims
her hair is simply “frizzy.” There’s a white girl named
Cindy who introduces herself to Huey and innocently asks if he knows Puffy.
These characters, according to McGruder, allow him to explore some of
the dynamics he’s interested in. These include the thug lifestyle
promoted by both entertainers and the media, the generation gap in the
black community, as well as the ideas of both assimilationists and revolutionaries.
Inspired by Japanese anime and drawn digitally, The Boondocks now runs
in over 250 papers around the world, although that number sometimes varies
due to content. Since September 11, McGruder’s commentaries on American
foreign policy, the Bush presidency, and life in general, have run into
trouble. Take a strip run on October 13, 2002. As Riley Freedman reads
a newspaper, he says: “Whoa. Some people in other countries are
comparing Bush to Adolf Hitler because of his warmongering.” Huey
replies, “That’s preposterous. Even I would never compare
Bush to Hitler … I mean, Hitler was democratically elected, wasn’t
he?”
McGruder’s willingness to cannonball into waters where others fear
to tread has led to what some call censorship and what others feel is
editorial discretion. Some newspapers, such as The Washington Post, elected
not to run the “Bush-Hitler” strip, among other problematic
strips; while The Dallas Morning News, in an interesting compromise, has
run controversial strips, but on the editorial page and away from the
comics section. Few individuals, much less cartoonists, generate the kind
of ire McGruder seems to effortlessly inflame.
While McGruder is clearly a risktaker, he’s got a plan. For one,
to “widen notions of what is acceptable. Little by little, people
get away with more. Two years ago, that strip would have ended my career.”
Instead of ending his career, McGruder has been profiled everywhere from
The New York Times to People magazine.
Although people may not have known McGruder or his characters when he
started, things have changed. Nowadays, “any time anybody black
does anything stupid, I get a call.” For instance, when Harry Belafonte
accused Colin Powell of being “a house slave,” Quincy Jones
called McGruder to tell him about it.
McGruder criticizes black leaders and entertainers just as freely as he
criticizes race relations in America. In fact, he says that “people
call fairly often when I write about them.” But he waits “until
the strip [the series] stops running before I [return the] call.”
McGruder, for instance, poked fun at Al Sharpton. When Al Sharpton was
busted during a drug deal while wearing a cowboy hat, McGruder said to
himself, “I’m gonna get two weeks out of that.” He also
joked about Sharpton’s political strategy. “You can’t
run for president with a perm. No one is sitting at the table of power
with a perm,” McGruder said.
In general, McGruder is very critical of black leaders, asking “Where
is the leadership?” In addition to Sharpton’s choice of hairstyle,
McGruder talked about Jesse Jackson’s PR debacle over the movie
Barbershop. But when audience members encouraged McGruder to become a
leader himself, he said, “I’m a cartoonist. I’m great
at observing the problems. The solutions are more complex.” Later
he also said, “The white man signs my checks. You don’t see
anything I do unless the white man lets you see it. Nobody whose checks
are signed by the white man is leading a revolution.”
These kinds of elevated expectations would be hard for any 28 year old
to bear. “I’m Gary Trudeau … only a lot less experienced,”
McGruder quipped. He also admitted that “there’s a lot I can’t
say. Either because the personal repercussions are too great … or
it won’t make the papers.”
The pressure of the deadline is another burden. McGruder is an aspiring
screen and television writer. The Boondocks, in fact, was originally conceived
as a television show. McGruder has been pulling “two all-nighters
a week for three years,” and this frantic schedule, in addition
to his other creative aspirations and his desire to “have a life,”
have inspired his approach to his work. “A lot of the things you
read are quiet attempts to end my career. The suicidal kamikaze approach
to cartooning.”
One of the ironies of McGruder’s career is that this approach, while
increasing criticism, also increases the ranks of his defenders and acclaim
for his work in general. Not to mention a dialogue about race in a country
where few, if any, political or spiritual leaders are willing to lead
the way.
The Chicago Tribune’s Don Wycliff, after the “Bush-Hitler”
strip ran, wrote in a column, “In the just-over two years that I
have been the Tribune’s public editor, rarely has a week gone by
without at least one complaint about The Boondocks. Invariably, the complaints
are from white readers; I can’t recall a single one from someone
who said he was black.”
So while McGruder throws gas on the flames of controversy, fans of The
Boondocks keep on reading in the hope that McGruder’s kamikaze approach
continues the way it’s been going: giving us a wild ride while leaving
the pilot miraculously unscathed.