The Boondocks by Aaron McGruder

Author:Aaron McGruder
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0-7407-0609-8
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Published: 2000-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

What marks McGruder’s sensibility as wonderfully perverse, though, is the way he, having set up that initial set of conditions, begins to drop in the details that will make it weirdly unravel, like a cartoon strip version of The Sims. In The Boondocks, the Freemans are just under twelve parsecs away from those cuddly, wide-eyed, Negro comic strip innocents we’ve grown to know and hate. Huey Freeman is a pint-sized, foot-high-Afro-wearing, razor-tongued Black revolutionary, and Riley is a half-pint-sized, platinum-coveting, foul-mouthed roughneck. Like Cain and Abel, they signify two long-standing, mutually opposed, vigorous traditions in the so-called Black community, clasped in uneasy, brotherly embrace.

Their foils? Their Southern, traditionalist grandfather, completing the symbolic triad of Black American modalities represented in the Freeman home: radical, integrationist, thug; a “biracial” girl, Jazmine DuBois; her Black father, Tom, and his white wife, Sarah, both lawyers; and Cindy, a white girl so clueless she has no idea why her request to touch Huey’s “different . . . cool” hair (p. 73) returns the promise of a pummeling.

With the addition of a few more minor characters, McGruder then rudely impales everything from Jar-Jar Binks, Star Wars fandom, telemarketers, and the NAACP to Puff Daddy, Black Entertainment Television, and Santa Claus. Certainly the only comic strip in history to have a character deem the U.S. was built on “stolen land,” advocate the formation of a local Klanwatch, and brutally dis Ward Connerly, The Boondocks avoids the boorishness to which others might sink by virtue of McGruder’s light saber-sharp intelligence, the drollness of his drawing style, and the consistency of his characters and their universe.

And, oh yeah: It’s mad funny. My conversion came early in the strip’s history, the moment Huey, meeting Jazmine for the first time, offhandedly called her “Mariah,” as in “Carey.” I think I screamed till my sides ached.

Hey: Truth hurts.

Free Jolly Jenkins!

Harry Allen,

Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin,

Harlem, New York

May 2000

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.