According to the Washington Post, Universal, the syndicator of the brilliant daily comic strip "The Boondocks," has announced that the strip is going on indefinite hiatus. The strip has been on hiatus since late March when creator Aaron McGruder, suffering from the fatigue, announced he was taking a six-month break. The strip was to resume in October, but McGruder reportedly has decided that he doesn't want the grind of a daily strip. The Boondocks television program will continue as planned.
If this does spell the permanent end of "The Boondocks," today is a very sad day. "The Boondocks" was consistently the funniest, smartest and most relevant cartoon in the comics section (sorry, "Doonesbury" fans). In terms of satire, it went where few in any medium dared. I'll continue to eulogize Huey and Riley after the jump, but first I want to show my favorite strip. It was written mere weeks after 9/11, when political humor was still strictly taboo. Naturally, it was banned from every single newspaper in the counrty. Here's what you missed:
Said Universal's president, Lee Salem:
"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. Numerous attempts . . . to pin McGruder down on a date that the strip would be coming back were unsuccessful."
Aaron McGruder, the mind behind "The Boondocks," is amazing for his ability to piss everybody off, left and right. He, unlike most "progressives" in the public sphere, has no problem pissing anybody off to their face. The most well known example occurred at the 2002 N.A.A.C.P. image awards. Condoleeza Rice asked McGruder if he'd include her in his strip. McGruder replied, right to her face, "Sorry. I don't draw mass murderers." Makes Bill Clinton look like a wuss.
In another famous incident, at the 138th birthday party of the liberal magazine
The Nation, McGruder nearly emptied a room of some of the most prominent liberals in America. According to
this brilliant 2004 New Yorker piece, the event was supposed to be something of a "coronation" for McGruder. McGruder came to the stage to give a speech to the likes of Joe Wilson, Robert Byrd, Charlie Rose, and even Uma Thurman. The article explains:
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 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...
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.
The New Yorker piece, which is a great read, also foreshadows the demise of the strip. It paints a portrait of a tired and cynical artist who was so worn out that he was no longer willing to put in the required effort to make the strip as great as it once had been. Perhaps it's the right time for the strip to end.
"The Boondocks" tv show is still on the air, and there are talks of a movie in the works. The TV show's satire can be pretty fantastic,
like this clip here lampooning certain Presidents and cabinet members, but it's a whole different beast. Brevity is the essence of wit, and the show lacks the punchiness and the timeliness of the strip.
According to the
Washington Post article, McGruder's answering machine said that he was taking time to "restore his creative juices." Until then, I urge you to go buy the Boondocks collections "A Right to Be Hostile" and "Public Enemy #2"Hopefully, one day, when McGruder is ready, we will see the daily strip again. Until then, I leave you with this bit of brilliance: