By IPS Correspondents
BOSTON, Nov 21 2000 (IPS)

Artist Aaron McGruder draws like a Japanese animator and writes like a black revolutionary from the Harlem Renaissance. That’s perhaps the best way to describe his politically and socially charged comic strip ‘The Boondocks’.

Boondocks, which means “in the middle of nowhere”, follows the lives of two socially conscious black children named Huey and Riley who live in a mostly-white town.

They are brothers, or better yet, “brothiz”, the correct way to pronounce, spell, and describe black male bonds in hip-hop lingo – the cultural vocabulary that permeates this smart strip.

The Boondocks strip itself has literally come out of nowhere – and with a splash. Starting online in 1996, it eventually hit major US daily papers like The Boston Globe only recently.

The strip, the newest by a black artist in mass circulation, adds to a slow growing list of black cartoonists in big US media. But The Boondocks is probably the most political and controversial of them all.

McGruder thinks nothing of taking on huge black media companies like the Black Entertainment Network (BET) and his characters have verbally assaulted George W. Bush.

Huey and Riley, the stars of the strip, never smile. They’re two little scholars, angry at white America and worried about black America. The strip has one white girl, a starry-eyed blonde named Cindy who loves rap music celebrities. Then there is Caesar, their “wanna-be rapper” buddy.

As to why the boys never smile, McGruder says: “Huey is too busy contemplating the hypocrisies of the world. Riley never smiles, but he might crack a smirk if doing something particularly tyrannical”. Other characters are happy-go-lucky and “kidlike”, McGruder says.

The brothers live with their grandfather and the parents are rarely mentioned. McGruder wants to keep the family life of the two boys a secret for now, he says.

Letters from younger fans, most of whom are die-hard hip-hop aficionados, ask for “cool” white rappers, Latino or Philipino characters, to be introduced. There is one Japanese boy named Hiro Otomo, a DJ. He speaks only through music. And there is one mulatta named Jazmine DuBois, the seed for bi- racial satire.

McGruder says he doesn’t want to turn the strip into a showcase for minorities and rappers. “The strip is meant to be an intelligent view of black-white relationships as well as black-black relationships,” he says.

“This is simply because I have a lifetime of experience in these areas and to effectively and intelligently poke fun at something as potentially explosive as race relations requires an in-depth knowledge of subtleties and nuances of the racial dynamic, not to mention an awareness of the line between humour and offence.”

McGruder, however, is not worried about offending certain sectors of society.

In one strip, Huey calls Texas Governor George W. Bush the “dumbest man alive”. Huey preferred the Green Party nominee Ralph Nader.

One of the more controversial strips was an attack on BET back in January. McGruder, drawing an illustration of a black women’s gyrating behind, criticised BET for considering themselves the herald of African- American enlightenment.

BET attacked McGruder in The Washington Post and McGruder shot back. “BET is bad for black people as a whole,” wrote the 25-year-old artist. “It exploits us, demeans us, and insults us.”

“There was a three-week span when Aaron was about as popular as Bill Cosby,” said cartoonist Jerry Craft, 37, creator of ‘Mama’s Boyz’. “People were either supporting him or calling for his head.”

A number of Boondocks strips were banned from The Chicago Tribune for “inappropriate material”. The strip was about drugs. McGruder has also written stories that were banned from The Washington Post.

Craft, whose one strip depicting pregnant teens trying to get into an R-rated movie was banned from the Prince George County Sentinel, a black weekly, said he thinks controversial strips aren’t only penned by black artists.

“I think it’s both ways. For some reason cartoonists strike a chord with people who read them and there are people who would complain about your cartoon before they would consider writing a letter to a congressman about something much more important,” Craft said from his Connecticut home.

“Black readers are tough because there are so few vehicles that represent us so we feel that it has to represent the entire African-American experience,” Craft said. “But there is no one African-American experience.

“In the 80s, black people said The Cosby Show wasn’t representative because it was about a doctor and a lawyer. In the 70s they said other shows showed us all living in the projects.”

The Cosby Show, which starred comedian Bill Cosby, was the number one rated television show in the United States for much of the 1980s.

“I love black people,” McGruder says, “and it really hurts me when black people are offended by my work. But at the same time, I can’t give 30 million black people individual lessons in the joys of satire and how to spot it.”

Black strip artists had newspaper syndicates opening doors to them when Morrie Turner published ‘We Pals’. The strip still appears in some papers. But the door has only remained opened a crack since Turner pushed through nearly 30 years ago.

Other daily strips like Jumpstart by Robb Armstrong and Curtis by Ray Billingsley are often competing against each other for pick-up in newspapers. Strip artists share concern that newspapers will run four or more stories about suburban white families, and will often choose only one black family strip.

“Cats have better representation in the comic strips than people of colour,” says K-Chronicles cartoonist Keith Knight from California.

What helps make Boondocks wildly popular is its artwork; a blend of Japanese anime (characters have wild, sharp hair and big eyes), and the highly commercialised hip hop culture, namely its music, its language, its celebrities and its attitude.

McGruder says Huey, Riley, Caesar and the girls will stay children for as long as Boondocks survives in print. That pleases his fans, but makes his enemies cringe, especially the ones itching to see McGruder go.

McGruder, who lives in California, posts hate mail from whites, blacks and native Americans at www.boondocks.net under the link “daily funny”.

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