Granddad Freeman on the flu vaccine shortage
Copyright © 2004 Aaron McGruder [Click on image to enlarge] 
Riley Freeman and Granddad: Priceless
Copyright © 2004 Aaron McGruder [Click on image to enlarge]
If this (fair & balanced) satire, so be it.
[x New Yorker]
THE RADICAL: Why do editors keep throwing “The Boondocks” off the funnies page?
by Ben McGrath
On the day of Saddam Hussein’s capture, last December, the left-leaning political weekly The Nation celebrated its hundred-and-thirty-eighth birthday. It was a Sunday night, and the weather was dreadful—forbiddingly cold and wet, heavy snow giving way to sleet—but three hundred people could not be deterred from dropping five hundred dollars a plate for roast chicken amid the marble-and-velvet splendor of the Metropolitan Club, on Fifth Avenue. Jean Stein, a veteran of the liberal party circuit and the mother of Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation’s editor, was there, as were E. L. Doctorow, John Waters, Charlie Rose, and even John McEnroe. Robert Byrd, the senior senator from West Virginia, was an honored guest; Amtrak had been advised of his itinerary, and, despite service delays all weekend, the train got him there on time. Joseph Wilson, the former Ambassador to Gabon, riding a wave of liberal good will since the politically motivated outing of his wife, the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame, attended as well, by special invitation.
Byrd spoke first, and he delivered a generous helping of full-throated Southern oratory. Yes, it was good to see Saddam gone, Byrd said, but he was ever more convinced, what with a “swashbuckling, ‘High Noon’” kind of President in office, that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time. “Thank God for courageous institutions like this one,” he said, “which are willing to stand up to the tide of popular convention.” He recited the closing lines of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and then, finishing up, invoked “the spirit of Longfellow.” Standing ovation.
Toward the dessert (chocolate torte) portion of the evening, Uma Thurman rose to introduce a special guest: Aaron McGruder, the creator of the popular and subversive comic strip “The Boondocks,” who, as it happens, had travelled farther than anyone else to be there, all the way from Los Angeles. McGruder, one of only a few prominent African-American cartoonists, had been making waves in all the right ways, poking conspicuous fun at Trent Lott, the N.R.A., the war effort. An exhibition of his comic strips—characters with Afros and dreadlocks drawn in a style borrowing heavily from Japanese manga,with accentuatedforeheads and eyes—was on display in the Metropolitan Club’s Great Hall. It seemed to be, as a Nation contributor said later, “his coronation as our kind of guy.”
But what McGruder saw when he looked around at his approving audience was this: a lot of old, white faces. What followed was not quite a coronation. McGruder, who rarely prepares notes or speeches for events like this, began by thanking Thurman, “the most ass-kicking woman in America.” Then he lowered the boom. He was a twenty-nine-year-old black man, he said, who got invited to such functions all the time, so you could imagine how bored he was. He proceeded to ramble, at considerable length, and in a tone, as one listener put it, of “militant cynicism,” with a recurring theme: that the folks in the room (“courageous”? Please) were a sorry lot.
He told the guests that he’d called Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser, a mass murderer to her face; what had they ever done? (The Rice exchange occurred in 2002, at the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards, where McGruder was given the Chairman’s Award; Rice requested that he write her into his strip.) He recounted a lunch meeting with Fidel Castro. (He had been invited to Cuba by the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, who is one of the few politicians McGruder has praised in “The Boondocks.”) He said that noble failure was not acceptable. But the last straw came when he “dropped the N-word,” as one amused observer recalled. He said—bragged, even—that he’d voted for Nader in 2000. At that point, according to Hamilton Fish, the host of the party, “it got interactive.”
Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation, was sitting in the back of the room, next to Joe Wilson, the Ambassador. He shouted out, “Thanks for Bush!” Exactly what happened next is unclear. Alterman recalls that McGruder responded by grabbing his crotch and saying, “Try these nuts.” Jack Newfield, the longtime Village Voice writer, says that McGruder simply dared Alterman to remove him from the podium. When asked about this incident later, McGruder said, “I ain’t no punk. I ain’t gonna let someone shout and not go back at him.”
Alterman walked out. “I turned to Joe and said, ‘I can’t listen to this crap anymore,’” he remembers. “I went out into the Metropolitan Club lobby—it’s a nice lobby—and I worked on my manuscript.”
Newfield joined in the heckling, as did Stephen Cohen, a historian and the husband of Katrina vanden Heuvel. “It was like watching LeRoi Jones try to Mau-Mau a guilty white liberal in the sixties,” Newfield says. “It was out of a time warp. Who is he to insult people who have been putting their careers and lives on the line for equal rights since before he was born?”
By the time McGruder had finished, and a tipsy Joe Wilson took the microphone to deliver his New Year’s Resolutions, perhaps half the guests had excused themselves to join Alterman in the lobby. A Nation contributor estimated that McGruder had offended eighty per cent of the audience. “Some people still haven’t recovered,” he said, sounding thrilled.
“At a certain point, I just got the uncomfortable feeling that this was a bunch of people who were feeling a little too good about themselves,” McGruder said afterward. “These are the big, rich white leftists who are going to carry the fight to George Bush, and the best they can do is blame Nader?”
He went on, laughing a little, “I was not the right guest for that event. I’ll be the first one to say that. It was one of those reminders that, yeah, I’m not this political leader that people are looking for.”
As a talented young black man who is outspoken in his political convictions, McGruder has grown accustomed to inordinately high expectations. The Green Party called him last year, asking if he might like to run for President. He had to point out that he wasn’t old enough. “I want to do stuff that has a moral center—stuff that I can be proud of,” he continued. “But I’m not trying to be that guy, the political voice of young black America, because then you have to sort of be a responsible grownup, for lack of a better word. And it’s like—you know, Flip Wilson said this, he said, ‘I reserve the right to be a nigger.’ And I absolutely do, at all times.”
Huey Freeman, the hero of “The Boondocks” and McGruder’s supposed alter ego, has not cracked a smile in five years of syndication. From the day he and his little brother, Riley, moved out of Chicago’s South Side to live comfortably with their granddad in the suburbs—the boondocks—Huey, a practicing member of the “church of self-righteousness,” has been treating readers of the funnies page to an unhealthy dose of indignation, paranoia, and hatred. He is perhaps ten years old, in that ageless cartoon way, with an Afro, a high forehead, perpetually knitted brows, and an unnatural familiarity with the precepts of socialist black nationalism. He has roughly equal contempt for Dick Cheney, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Santa Claus.
“Since when are millions of Americans ready to wake up to the rantings of an angry black kid?” Huey’s best friend, Caesar, a dreadlocked, droopy-eyed transplant from Brooklyn, once asked him, in an early installment of the strip. The joke was obvious and boastful; by then “The Boondocks” was appearing more or less daily in some two hundred and thirty newspapers (it is now in three hundred), including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. More or less daily because editors tended to suspend Huey and company from their pages on occasions when the intentions of the strip’s author—to provide “a daily foot in the ass of The Man”—were achieved a little too vividly. (A dozen editors had already expelled the Freeman family for good; still others had relocated McGruder to the op-ed page.)
The Freeman trio—Huey, Riley (a wanna-be thug), and Granddad (a cantankerous skeptic and resigned pragmatist)—represent “three different facets of the sort of angry-black-man archetype,” according to McGruder. He recently published an anthology of the strip’s first few years, titled “A Right to Be Hostile.” More angry books are on the way. “Profits of Rage” is the working title of one, a text-only manifesto fashioned after the works of Michael Moore and Al Franken. “Huey’s Hate Book,” a planned coffee-table volume, is another.
Like the Freeman brothers, McGruder was born on the South Side of Chicago, though he didn’t stay there long. The McGruders—Aaron, his parents, and an older brother, Dedric, who is now a part-time political cartoonist—shuffled around some before settling, when Aaron was six, in the middle-class suburb of Columbia, Maryland. (Aaron’s father works for the National Transportation Safety Board.) Columbia is in some ways the inspiration for Woodcrest, the fictional home of the “Boondocks” characters. It was a planned community—envisioned as a sort of integrationist, post-civil-rights utopia—developed by the Rouse Company in the mid-nineteen-sixties, and featuring an official town “Tree of Life,” and streets and neighborhoods with names like Hobbit’s Glen and Morning Walk and Elfstone Way. (Huey and Riley live on Timid Deer Lane, one block over from Bashful Beaver.)
McGruder’s was a fairly typical, well-adjusted eighties childhood, and he had typical interests: “Star Wars,” Charlie Brown, kung fu. He went to a Jesuit school—“a very strict, very, very white Jesuit school”—outside Columbia from seventh through ninth grade. “Those were the most oppressive years of my life,” he told me. (Huey and Riley, not coincidentally, attend J. Edgar Hoover Elementary.) They were also the years in which he was exposed to his greatest, and perhaps most surprising, comedic influence. “When I was in seventh grade, I discovered Monty Python,” he said. “That shit still kills me. I try to get my friends to watch that and they just can’t get it. ‘No, no, no, it’s funny—the lumberjack!’‘Life of Brian’ is, to me, the most brilliant piece of satire ever—it’s just brilliant. He’s trying to write ‘Romans go home’ in Latin and he can’t do the Latin right.” McGruder shook his head. “A lot of black people ain’t up on Monty Python like they should be.”
In tenth grade, he transferred to public school and began, for the first time, really, to hang out with other black people. He listened to a lot of hip-hop music. It was the era of politically conscious rap: Public Enemy, KRS-One (Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone), X-Clan. “All that sort of radical, pro-black-nationalist type of music—it was just a fad, but at fifteen and sixteen you’re very impressionable,” he told me. “It was one of the few times, I think, in black history when as a young person you could be cool and intellectual at the same time.” (McGruder, who is proud to call himself a nerd, no longer thinks of himself as cool. “Most cool niggas I know are broke,” he said.)
The first person ever to publish “The Boondocks” was the disgraced New York Times fabulist Jayson Blair, who was then editing The Diamondback, the campus paper at the University of Maryland, where McGruder majored in African-American studies. “We weren’t friends, but he seemed like the brother who had figured out the system,” McGruder recalls of Blair. “It was like, ‘You don’t seem one hundred per cent down, but you’re definitely not a Tom. Somehow you’re making it work.’” That was the end of 1996; less than two years later, having found an audience among the largely white Maryland readership, McGruder signed a deal with the Universal Press Syndicate, the publisher of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” and in April of 1999 “The Boondocks” began appearing in a hundred and sixty papers—one of the biggest launches in the history of comics.
Even after the Metropolitan Club melee, McGruder has continued to receive and accept invitations to deliver lectures—at banquets, on college campuses, in corporate boardrooms. The Sony Music Group flew him to New York in February for one such talk, and he agreed to meet me for dinner afterward. He arrived at the restaurant, a small, country-style spot near Gramercy Park, wearing a James Brown T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. He is not, in person, imposing or striking or noticeably angry—not the kind of guy you’d expect to be challenging anyone to a fight. He is short, with soft features, a slight goatee, and the beginnings of an Afro. Unlike Huey, he smiles—sheepishly and often.
“Somebody has to sort of translate the drums for white folks, and occasionally they call me to try to do it,” McGruder explained. It was a good hustle, the lecture circuit, he said. In the course of three hours—McGruder tends to answer each question with a fifteen-minute monologue—he returned repeatedly to this familiar trope of cynical entrepreneurialism. People like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly, he said, were hustlers. “It’s like, ‘The more ridiculous shit I say that’s hurtful and hateful and racist, the more you stupid rednecks will buy books,’” he said, in a deep, slightly nasal baritone. “I don’t even get mad at them, ’cause I get what it is. I’m in the same game.”
Larry Elder, an African-American radio host and a frequent McGruder critic, was a hustler, too: “He decided to be the black guy that makes money by saying the things that white people want black people to say.” (Elder, in a recent op-ed column, suggested that an award for the “Dumbest, Most Vulgar, Most Offensive Things Uttered by Black Public Figures” be dubbed the McGruder.)
“I’m always on the fence: do I want to be one of those guys?” McGruder said. “I love Michael Moore”—Moore wrote the foreword to “A Right to Be Hostile,” praising McGruder’s “bodacious wit”—“and I see what he does. He’s got the game down, and that’s not a bad thing. People act like you can’t be a left-winger and be rich at the same time, like that’s some type of hypocrisy. It’s not hypocrisy. You gotta get paid. This isn’t the days of the civil-rights era, where you can change the world with a picket sign. You gotta get your money up.”
McGruder’s politics are to the left of Dennis Kucinich, but he retains an old man’s conservative, almost reactionary instinct, which, combined with the mo’-money shtick, gives “The Boondocks” a healthy comic balance. On the page, of course, he is able to separate these competing strands into distinct characters, each of whom comes off as both likable and laughable. The tension is harder to reconcile in real life, when he is by turns idealistic and dead serious (Huey), immature and carefree (Riley), and grumpy and tired (Granddad).
He told me that we have a state-run media in America, and then, catching himself, added, “I know what this sounds like: conspiracy theory. But you know what? A conspiracy is something hidden. This shit is out in the open. People are just too dumb to see it.” Huey was in control (in the strip, he publishes his own broadsheet, The Free Huey World Report), arguing, with conviction, that contemporary journalism is “a goddam sham.”
Another minute, though, he channelled Riley—his shoulders were slumped, and he bowed his head a little forward, avoiding eye contact—and said that when he can help it he prefers not to read the newspaper. “I’m not the guy that wants to spend my life being some kind of closet intellectual,” he said. “I want to play ‘Vice City.’ I just want to drive around and shoot innocent people. I’m all about video games.”
Addressing the rampant commercialism in contemporary rap music, he slipped effortlessly into Granddad mode. “I’ve never understood all the obsession over diamonds and jewelry and designer clothes—that just seems female to me,” he nearly groaned.
McGruder didn’t leave himself a lot of time to eat. He pointed at a nearby table and said, “If that was Bill Watterson”—the author of “Calvin and Hobbes”—“neither one of us would know it. Bill Watterson was in two thousand papers. A million more people have read ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ than will ever read ‘The Boondocks.’ But Bill Watterson decided he didn’t want to be a personality.”
Aaron McGruder is, without question, a personality. While we waited for the check, he leaned back and rattled off what amounted to a left-wing standup-comedy routine, touching on the major and minor issues of the day, his soft-spoken manner giving way to a performer’s bravado.
“You make a movie about a senile Republican President,” he said, referring to the made-for-TV “The Reagans,” “and they gonna answer back by trying to put his face on the fucking dime. That’s how gangsta they are.”
Next came the Super Bowl, and the flap over Janet Jackson’s exposed breast. “We got—how many?—five hundred dead in Iraq, and several thousand more wounded, and they worried about a titty. A titty! What kind of sorry-ass nation is this?”
As we left the restaurant, a small elderly white woman seated a few tables away got up and approached McGruder. She said she was from New Zealand. “I like everything you’ve been saying,” she said. “I agree with you.”
“That’s a good New Zealander,” he said as he pushed open the door.
Several years ago in “The Boondocks,” an earnest black lawyer named Tom DuBois (he’s married to a white woman) wondered aloud, “Is there anyplace or anything that has been left unscarred by the cynics and the purveyors of bitterness, anger and despair? Does there exist, anywhere, an unadulterated land of childhood fantasy and imagination? Is there no innocence left in the world?” Huey Freeman responded, with his trademark scowl, “What about the funnies?”
McGruder doesn’t read the funnies, and he doesn’t like the people who draw them. Growing up, he was a “Peanuts” fan, like everyone else, and he counts “Doonesbury” and “Bloom County,” featuring Opus, the iconic political penguin, as influences. But mostly he sees the comics page, with all its benign Dennis the Menaces and Heathcliffs and Blondies, as the domain of “seventy-year-old white men,” some of whom—like Bil Keane, the author of the vaguely Christian “Family Circus,” and Mort Walker, of “Beetle Bailey”—he freely admits to not respecting.
“I don’t go to the cartoonist conventions,” McGruder said. “I went once, to the Reuben Awards”—the Oscars of cartooning—“and I didn’t feel very welcome. I felt a palpable sense of resentment. Bil Keane was the m.c., and he opened doing more than one joke that was clearly aimed at me. It was raw—just some fucked-up shit. O.K., and yet, if I get out of my chair right now and beat the shit out of you, then I’m the bad guy? You’re sitting here, clearly dogging me—not by name, but how many black cartoonists are working? He told some joke about diversity in comics. Like ‘There’s a lot of diversity in comics these days. They don’t have to be funny, they just have to be diverse.’ There were a couple of shots at me where I was like, ‘Motherfucker, you don’t know me. We’re not cool.’”
McGruder believes that Huey, who gets his name from the Black Panther Huey Newton, is “ultimately the blackest character ever to be popular in mainstream media, other than maybe Chuck D and Flavor Flav,” founding members of Public Enemy. Certainly, in the comics industry—“an industry with no soul,” McGruder says—he does not have stiff competition.
Colored faces were not uncommon in the early comics—vaudeville sendups of immigrant life that helped fuel the turn-of-the-century newspaper wars—but they were, as a rule, severe caricatures. (R. F. Outcault, the creator of the famous “Yellow Kid,” depicted poor blacks living in a place called Possumville.) It wasn’t until 1965, with Morrie Turner’s “Wee Pals,” that the mainstream press carried a syndicated cartoon strip by a black man, with recurring—and respectably human—black characters. And it took the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, to spark real national distribution for the strip. That same year, Charles Schulz gave Charlie Brown a black friend, Franklin, and Brumsic Brandon, Jr., started “Luther,” which was named after Dr. King. “Luther” was set in the ghetto, and Brandon said that his intention was to “tell it like it is.” In the strip, which ran until 1986, Brandon introduced characters with names like Oreo and Hardcore, but he dealt only sparingly with race relations.
By the late nineties, when McGruder was starting out, there were still just two widely read comic strips being drawn by blacks: “Curtis,” by Ray Billingsley, and “Jump Start,” a decidedly bourgeois feature, by Robb Armstrong. “The Boondocks,” with its dreadlocks and manga influences, looked immediately different from these and everything else in the newspaper. Today, thanks in no small part to McGruder’s accelerated success, the typical comics page offers at least a modest degree of diversity. There is a strip called “La Cucaracha,” with mostly Latino characters, which began in 2001 and runs in about fifty papers. And there are more new black-themed strips enjoying minor distribution, like “Candorville” and “Housebroken.”
McGruder’s influence in this respect has often been acknowledged, and occasionally condemned. At the Image Awards ceremony, he was cited for his “dignified representation of people of color,” but in recent years the signature gag of his strip has probably been his annual “Most Embarrassing Black People” awards. (LL Cool J, Jesse Jackson, Whitney Houston: few escape his scorn.) Larry Elder is not alone among black voices in decrying the negativity of “The Boondocks.” Robert Johnson, the chief executive of BET (that’s Black Exploitation Television, or Butts Every Time, according to Huey), has said that his employees do “more in one day to serve the interest of African-Americans than this young man has done in his entire life.” As for his imitators in the comics, McGruder, ever confrontational and protective of his turf, does not find their emulation flattering. “I look at everything from a hip-hop perspective,” he says. “My point of view on that is very obvious: get off my dick, leave my shit alone.”
A few days after the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, McGruder called the Universal Press Syndicate and asked what Trudeau planned on doing with “Doonesbury.” “They said, ‘Garry’s not touching it,’” he told me. “It was like a make-or-break moment, and I just decided this is why I got into cartooning. I’m not going to waste it talking about Puffy.” (Puffy, or Puff Daddy, has been a frequent target of McGruder’s ridicule, primarily for his role in steering hip-hop away from intellectual engagement and toward preening self-display.)
Later, he went out for lunch with his friends Reginald Hudlin, the film director, and Chris Rock, the comedian. Hudlin asked Rock whether, if he still had his own TV show, he would be mining the tragic events for material. “He was like, ‘Oh, yeah!’” Hudlin told me. “He right there on the spot did fifteen minutes on 9/11 that was genius, and just to hear it done as impeccably as Chris did it was inspiring to all of us. And I think that really freed Aaron’s mind up. He did some of his greatest work following that.”
Before September 11th, McGruder had been struggling mightily under the burden of non-stop deadlines—“My greatest weakness, and, sadly, everybody knows it, is my lateness”—to the point where his health was failing. (“Ever see a seven-day-a-week cartoonist?” Berkeley Breathed, the creator of “Bloom County,” once said. “They all look like Keith Richards at 5 a.m.”) In 2000, shortly after moving out of his parents’ basement to an apartment in Los Angeles, he had been hospitalized with stress-related symptoms. He had been thinking seriously about giving up the strip altogether.
In “The Boondocks,” post-9/11, Huey was quick to announce that he planned to “stay cynical.” He began calling the F.B.I. to suggest names of terrorist financiers and war criminals worthy of prosecution: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger. John Ashcroft appeared on television to explain his new “Turban Surveillance Act,” and the prospect of a congressional “anti-evil” bill, it was suggested, would force Vice-President Cheney into hiding once again. The Daily News banned “The Boondocks” for several weeks. At one point, in the middle of October, McGruder finally relented and put a muzzle on Huey. Adapting an idea from Rock’s lunch-table improvisation, he replaced “The Boondocks” for a week with a new, faux-jingoistic strip, “The Adventures of Flagee and Ribbon.” (Said the ribbon to the flag, “Hey, Flagee, there’s a lot of evil out there.” Replied the flag, “That’s right, Ribbon. Good thing America kicks a lot of *@#!”)
McGruder’s deadline troubles abated. “The strips were writing themselves,” he said. Their primary focus had shifted, as he put it, from “life and love and teachers and lawnmowers to Bush and Bush and, well, Bush.”
Trudeau, who, before long, did incorporate September 11th into “Doonesbury,” admires McGruder, but he said that such a singularity of purpose “always runs the danger of becoming tedious.” He went on, “When I was starting out, my editor once said, ‘You can write about Vietnam this week, but you damn well better write about football next week.’ His point was that you have to take your knee off the reader’s windpipe from time to time.”
For McGruder, though, noisy defiance is an end in itself. “I was very disappointed that I didn’t get the Pulitzer that year,” he said. “That sounds like some really egotistical shit to say”—among funnies-page artists, only Trudeau and Breathed have ever won it—“but I really felt like that was mine by a long shot. The shit that I was able to get away with after September 11th was really astounding.”
Last October, McGruder granted Condoleezza Rice’s wish and put her in the strip. In the Monday installment of a weeklong series, Caesar announced that he had a “simple and easy plan to save the world.” On Tuesday, he elaborated: “Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleezza truly loved, she wouldn’t be so hell-bent to destroy it.” Huey agreed. “Condoleezza’s just lonely and bitter,” he said. And so on. The boys began composing personal ads: “Female Darth Vader type seeks loving mate to torture”; “High-ranking government employee with sturdy build seeks single black man for intimate relationship. Must enjoy football, Chopin, and carpet bombing.” Huey even anticipated his critics—this is a favorite device of McGruder’s—by observing, “What I really like about this idea is that it isn’t the least bit sexist or chauvinistic.”
Some readers accused McGruder of effectively calling Rice a lesbian (both McGruder and Greg Melvin, his editor, insist that this never crossed their minds), while others complained that the joke was indeed unacceptably sexist and chauvinistic. The Washington Post’s executive editor, Leonard Downie, Jr., thought so, and he withheld the entire week’s worth of “Boondocks”—the longest such suspension in the paper’s history. (The Post’s ombudsman, Michael Getler, later sided with McGruder, writing that he “found the sequence of strips within the bounds of allowable satire.”)
McGruder, true to form, was unchastened. A month later, Huey and Caesar were still trying to find Rice a date, and in the course of their continued plotting they’d managed to call Ann Coulter a man and to suggest that Larry Elder is gay.
Politically charged comics are not the domain solely of the left (“Mallard Fillmore,” for instance, stars a Republican duck), and in some respects McGruder’s closest compatriot in subversion is his opposite: Johnny Hart, the seventy-three-year-old white man behind “B.C.” Hart became a born-again Christian in the late nineteen-eighties, and he has since been accused of evangelizing in his comic—sometimes at the expense of other religions. Most notably, last November, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Hart drew a “B.C.” strip in which a caveman—the feature’s main character—is seen entering an outhouse and heard exclaiming, from inside, “Is it just me, or does it stink in here?” The word “slam,” arranged in a vertical line, or an I formation, as some readers observed, occupied the space between two panels. Crescent moons—symbols of Islam—appeared throughout. Was Hart saying that an entire world religion stinks? Many Muslim readers thought so. Hart denies it. “It would be contradictory to my own faith as a Christian to insult other people’s beliefs,” he said. On the other hand, given the bewildering nature of the cartoon, it is hard to imagine what else he could have meant.
“So many strips are so completely unfunny that when you read a comic strip and it doesn’t make you laugh, and you don’t even see where the joke is supposed to be, it’s not surprising,” McGruder told me. “Because that’s more the norm than the exception: ‘Uh, I don’t get it.’” This, he suggested, can serve as a cover for barbed editorializing—and cartoonists know it. “Those of us who do politically oriented comic strips delight in those moments when we can sneak one past the gatekeeper,” McGruder continued. “Hart’s working hard and being clever to put across, I think, a very hateful point. I’m often accused of the same thing. To me, as long as it’s fair, as long as one side is not more restricted than the other, then let him say what he wants to say—and I’m not saying he don’t deserve to get his ass beaten. I’m always sort of on the lookout for someone who’s going to step to me over what I say.”
For the past few years, McGruder has been trying to adapt “The Boondocks” for the screen. Last July, Sony bought the rights to produce both an animated television series and a feature film based on the strip, and Fox signed on to distribute the TV show as a prime-time vehicle. McGruder’s Hollywood career entails making appearances at events—Hugh Hefner’s birthday bash, Puff Daddy’s MTV Movie Awards party—where he is apt to run into the kinds of people who might wish to step to him over what he says. “It’s terribly awkward, especially when they’re nice,” McGruder told me. Will Smith was one such example. “I had demolished Will, just demolished ‘Ali,’ and that movie he did with Matt Damon—I called it ‘Driving Matt Damon.’ And Will is one of, like, seven black men that can get a movie green-lit in Hollywood that costs over twenty million dollars. It’s like, ‘Oh, I burned that bridge.’”
To help McGruder deal with the stresses that accompany entertainment-industry success, he occasionally works with a personal trainer—part martial-arts expert and part meditation guru—named Rashon Kahn. Kahn, who has also worked with the comedians Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Jamie Foxx, says that his goal with McGruder is “to help him stay grounded with his journey.” This has involved, at times, showing up at McGruder’s home to cook for him. (“I always recommend to everyone, ‘Eat your vegetables, your salads, your lean meats,’” Kahn says.)
Amid all this, the comic strip has suffered. For one thing, McGruder doesn’t draw “The Boondocks” anymore. He passed the sketching and inking duties to a Boston-based artist, Jennifer Seng, around the time of the Condoleezza Rice flap, last fall. “If something had to give, it was going to be the art,” he told me. “I think I’m a better writer than artist.” Maybe so, but his writing attention does not seem as focussed on the strip, either.
More and more, “The Boondocks,” which once stood out for its density, seems spare: a lot of white space; little, if any, visual progression from panel to panel. McGruder often gives us Huey or Granddad—it doesn’t really matter who—watching television, alone. The text comes directly from the TV, usually in the form of a political joke (“Bush and Bush and, well, Bush”), and the character’s reaction, if there is one at all, is immaterial. The strip has become an almost incidental vehicle for one-liners.
“‘The Boondocks’ is brand-new, relatively speaking, and he’s already stripped away the backgrounds,” Garry Trudeau told me. “And he was using cut-and-paste images before he handed off the art. And he also stopped telling stories, for the most part, which I thought was a pity.”
“Sometimes he’s stuck on a deadline and we try to jam out a bunch of strips together,” Reggie Hudlin told me. “My mind naturally goes to a narrative. And he goes, ‘No, no, no, just need a punch line.’ I once said Aaron’s exhaustion comes from doing essentially a comedy haiku every day.”
McGruder says that he suffers from “comic claustrophobia.” He has come to hate the confines of the strip as a medium, and this realization has made him gravitate toward screenwriting instead. “You mean I got all this space?” he said. “Dialogue? It’s like a prisoner getting to run outside and do cartwheels.”
Hudlin, who directed the black comedies “House Party” and “Boomerang,” is McGruder’s entrée to the Hollywood hustle, and his partner in adapting “The Boondocks” for animation, and other projects. The two met back when Aaron was in college, and they had “one of those freakish, separated-at-birth moments,” Hudlin said. (Hudlin, who is forty-two, also grew up worshipping Monty Python.) He sees “The Boondocks” as belonging to a multimedia tradition, extending from music—the old-school hip-hop of McGruder’s high-school years, say—to the page and the screen, occupying what he calls the “space for a kind of playful black intelligentsia.”
Hudlin and McGruder have written a couple of scripts and a graphic novel together. The book, called “Birth of a Nation,” reimagines the 2000 Florida election fiasco in East St. Louis, Illinois, and has the city seceding from the union to form its own country, Blackland. (In Blackland, Denzel Washington is on the twenty-dollar bill.) It will be published this summer.
Most of the time, though, they work on the pilot for Fox. It’s been twenty years since “Fat Albert,” the last black animated series on a major network, went off the air, so the prospect of “The Boondocks” going to prime time is significant. Largely by necessity, the show is meant to be more character-driven than the current incarnation of the strip, a reversion to the early period of its syndication—the days of life and love and teachers and lawnmowers. Animation demands a nine-month lead time, which precludes the kind of topicality that McGruder has come to rely on.
If there are two models guiding the show’s development, they are probably “The Simpsons,” the beacon of virtually all televised satire and animation, and, paradoxically, “All in the Family,” the seventies sitcom starring Carroll O’Connor as the bigoted Everyman Archie Bunker. McGruder has frequently been told by studio executives that they’re looking to re-create “All in the Family”—to be just controversial enough to draw attention, that is, without getting kicked off the air, by creating another Archie Bunker type, a “character who just spouts off ignorance.” He finds this line of reasoning suspicious. “As I understand it, the creators and the networks originally thought, O.K., well, this show’s going to be great, ’cause everybody’s going to get the joke that Archie’s a lovable idiot, and people are going to look at it as a satire of racism,” he said. “They found out that the reason people loved the show is because they agreed with Archie Bunker.”
The strategy for the “The Boondocks” revolves, in part, around confronting this fact head on and—what else?—undermining it. Among the new characters that McGruder and Hudlin plan to introduce is a neighborhood handyman called Uncle Ruckus—“just the worst, most bitter, angriest motherfucker you could imagine,” as McGruder sees him—who will serve as the town bus driver, the school janitor, the local gardener, the babysitter, the massage therapist. “Everywhere you look, he’s there,” McGruder said, almost giddily. “This guy just loves all the little white children in the neighborhood”—Uncle Ruckus is black—“and he’s basically straight out of the eighteenth century. I mean, he is a slave.” Uncle Ruckus brings a new, fully realized archetype to the varieties of haters in McGruder’s universe; he is “the world’s most self-hating black man.”
McGruder lives in a penthouse apartment on a leafy side street at the edge of Beverly Hills, with a balcony overlooking the Four Seasons Hotel. I visited him there shortly before he flew to Seoul to oversee the animation process for the “Boondocks” pilot, which is scheduled to be delivered to Fox later this month. (Even if it succeeds, the show will likely not air until next year.) He had come down with bronchitis while in New York for the Sony lecture, and the combination of his health and the logistics surrounding his impending Asia trip (“The dude only owns, like, two sweaters,” McGruder’s assistant, Shawn Socoloff, told me) meant that he was even farther behind than usual on his deadlines.
The décor of the apartment was an immediate reminder that McGruder is not an enthusiastic grownup. He keeps a Yoda statue in one corner, among some potted plants; PlayStation sits on the floor; and there’s a Bruce Lee poster on the wall. Elsewhere there are light sabres, a pair of Incredible Hulk fists, and a figurine of Lucy from “Peanuts.” When I arrived, he was busy playing executive producer in a series of overlapping conference calls—cell phone in one hand, home phone in the other—and watching TV with the volume turned down, ostensibly trolling for ideas for the strip. (ABC Family was on, showing a rerun of the late-eighties sitcom “Full House.”)
At issue was a planned casting session for the show which McGruder worried was being done on the cheap. “What does Reggie think? . . . Shawn, can you get Phil on the line? . . . Four days is not enough time. We were told a week. . . . It’s getting to the point where you try to cut costs so much that it’s not worth doing at all.” Already, RZA, of the Wu-Tang Clan, Ja Rule, and the actress-singer Brandy had auditioned to do the voices. (Female characters are notably rare in “The Boondocks,” but adult women, as is the norm in animation, will play the young boys.)
He began flipping the channels while he was on hold, and landed on BET. The rapper 50 Cent appeared on the screen—it was a Top Ten video countdown—and he was shirtless, with lots of jewelry around his neck, smoking a blunt. “Black people are doing bad things,” McGruder-as-Granddad muttered. “They doing real bad.”
Jen, the “Boondocks” artist, called from Boston, wondering what she should draw for the Sunday strip, whose all-or-nothing deadline was the following morning. (Most Sunday editions are expected a month before publication; in this instance, the three-week mark was approaching.) He told her that he was tapped out, no ideas. “Worse comes to worst,” he said, “I’ll call the syndicate tomorrow and throw in the towel on this one, tell them it ain’t happening.” In the meantime, he suggested that she just draw Huey watching TV. “But try to do it a little different, somehow, from all the other times,” he said.
One of McGruder’s friends joined him, and he continued to flip the channels, looking for inspiration. They started watching “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump’s reality show, in which, at the end of each episode, Trump looks one contestant in the eye and says, “You’re fired.” Finally, an idea came to McGruder.
“For several days, I’ve been looking for the joke in all of the exporting jobs overseas,” McGruder said the next day. “So, at the end of the show, it just hit me: if they really want to teach these kids a lesson, they’ll fire all of them and move the reality show to Mexico. And that ended up being the joke. Remember I told Jen just to draw one panel of Huey watching television? That’s a joke I can sort of fit into that one panel. There’s a narration box at the top: ‘A very special episode of NBC’s “The Apprentice.”’ And then, from the television, you hear, ‘We figured out it’s more cost-efficient to do the show from Mexico, so you’re all fired.’ So that saved the day, and that’s how it goes. That’s how it often works.”
There is, at first, something disappointing in this vision of America’s most radical cartoonist at work: slouched on the sofa, armed with a remote and TiVo, not a pencil or a drawing board—or even a snarl—in sight. McGruder is not yet thirty, and already he is jaded, content to settle for the kind of perfectly passable work he so often eviscerates others for. Or maybe this is the point: he is not yet thirty. He has aspirations to raise hell for a whole new audience, in a whole different way, and he is afraid of blowing the opportunity on a stupid youthful mistake. With that in mind, he has decided to lay off Condoleezza Rice—seemingly a prime target these days, in the wake of Richard Clarke’s allegations—for the near future. “Having that show on the air just opens up a whole new realm in terms of power and influence,” he said. “I want to say the things no one else can say, but it’s a tightrope walk. Up till now it has always paid off for me. I’m waiting for the moment when it will not pay off.”
Last week, “Doonesbury” took on Rice, even going so far as to accuse her of having “little flecks of blood” on her hands. “The Boondocks,” meanwhile, was just getting around to discussing “The Passion.”
That last night in L.A., before flying off to Korea, McGruder sounded both weary and cocksure. “I wanted to be a cartoonist, and like six months after that I got signed, and I’m here,” he said. “And ten years from now I’ll be, like, getting an Academy Award. This is not the beginning and end of my life.”
There is an old “Boondocks” strip in which Huey and Caesar are shown discussing the logo design for their intended revolution. Huey storms off, frustrated. “I don’t know why I gotta lead the revolution and illustrate it, anyway,” he says. “I don’t even like drawing.”
Ben McGrath is a writer at The New Yorker.
Copyright © 2004 The New Yorker
