The Boondocks cartoon ruffles feathers with its commentary on black American culture and politics
Aaron McGruder is a clean-shaven young man, dressed in simple, understated clothes, who uses expressions like “minimalist approach” and “moralconsciousness.” It’s hard to connect this diplomatic, relaxed college-type kid with the person USAToday described as “the most dangerous black man in America.”
For nearly nine years, McGruder has been the talentbehind The Boondocks, a popular if controversial comicstrip about Huey Freeman, a precocious, intellectual and very angry black 10-year-old, his thug-wannabe younger brother, Riley “Escobar,” and their exploits as fish out of water in a wealthy white suburb.
McGruder has never shied away from controversial opinions. Several U.S. newspapers temporarily pulled his strip in the years after Sept. 11, as McGruderquestioned the official version of the events of that day and railed against the war in Iraq. If anything, the cartoon version of the strip, set to premiere on Teletoon this Friday, is even more controversial.
Borrowing heavily from the Japanime style of animation and featuring a hip, urban soundtrack, the show seems to have liberated McGruder from the narrow confines of a three-panel-per-day comic strip and allowed him to tell longer, more complex stories. Each episode of The Boondocks is a parable about American and black American culture and politics, and despite the show’s humour, it can sometimes get quite intense — such as one episode where a gangsta rapper involved in a deadly rap feud is exposed as a scared, whimpering child, in over his head and afraid to die.
Most recently, McGruder’s show, which has been on in the U.S. since November, caught flak from the media after Rev. Al Sharpton criticized a fantasy episode in which Martin Luther King Jr., alive today,describes the new generation of black youth as “a bunch of trifling, shiftless, good-for-nothing n****z.”
“I’m going to stand by Al on this one,” McGrudertold Canadian media last week. “I think we need to fight me, and do something to stop me from doing this anymore.”
With an 18+ rating in Canada, The Boondocks is not for kids, but McGruder is ambivalent about whether children should be allowed to see it. “The decisions on what kids watch should be left up to the parents,” he says, then pauses for a moment, and adds, “but if I was 12, I’d watch it.”
Dose
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
