#20[b]: A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury, by Aaron McGruder
#20[b]: A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury, Aaron McGruder
2003, Three Rivers Press
This is hilarious. I remember reading The Boondocks on and off while it was running in newspapers (more off than on; I was moving around a lot and not all my papers carried it), and I remember being sometimes impressed but often lukewarm on it. I remember formulating the impression that it was presumably the strip's controversy value and what Amazon somewhat coyly calls its "notoriety" that made it such a big success. (What "notoriety" means here is, among other things, visibly black characters talking about visible black issues, often with no white people in sight(!), and, with enormous daring, going so far as to claim the aforementioned right to be hostile. In America's newspapers! In the funny pages!)
Anyway, reading this compilation, I'm forced to dramatically revise my opinion. This is fabulous stuff. McGruder's incisiveness, cutting wit, characterization and sense of timing are often nothing short of brilliant. The strip really does bring to mind the eminent predecessors McGruder cites as influences in the foreword (Trudeau, Watterson, Breathed). (All of which leaves me unsure why I didn't find the strip quite so awesome at the time, except that it does come to mind that collections allow authors the luxury of picking and choosing; McGruder may have wisely left out a lot of duds. ;)
Anyway. What is awesome about this strip? Well, I mean, first, a lot of the things I've previously mentioned, in terms of the sharpness, character consistency and rhythm. (McGruder's art skills aren't all that, but Garry Trudeau proved that a sufficiently clever word-oriented cartoonist can overcome that, and McGruder's art was both stronger and more consistent than Trudeau's from the start. Also: the manga-influenced style he uses to render these young black kids in the suburbs? A gorgeous syncretism, that, I think, could not have been better timed or placed when he started his run in the late '90s.)
Also, McGruder's protagonist Huey is a great character. He is a ten-year-old cute kid, and he never smiles. Good Lord, people! Have you ever thought about how hard it is to win the audience's sympathy for a protagonist who never smiles?! This is tantamount to the challenge Steve Ditko and Stan Lee faced back in the early '60s when they had the brilliant idea of introducing a character whose entire face is covered by a mask -- Ditko had to work hard to make Spider-Man's body language convey his emotions! And McGruder, like Trudeau, accomplished the same thing using the relatively very few tools at his disposal: the tilt of an eyebrow, and words. Huey's a brilliant accomplishment, I tell you: absolutely brilliant.
(Um... {cough} I may be a little geeky, on the technical/historical side, about comics. Now you know.)
Anyway, and of course it is quite interesting and important that Huey doesn't smile. Neither does Riley, his media-brainwashed eight-year-old brother; and their grandfather, who is their parental figure, does so very seldom. This matters, because even if Riley's reason for never smiling is idiotic (he's practicing his "thug mug," even though HE IS EIGHT), Huey doesn't smile because he's obsessed with matters of history, politics, and social in/justice. He's a ten-year-old who knows too much to smile. And that -- even though, granted, Huey's over-the-top intensity is periodically lampooned and undermined, mostly by his more even-keeled best friend Caesar -- that is a huge, subtle, and important statement, all by itself.
(When else have the comics had so introspective, and so depressed, a child protagonist? Charlie Brown; Milo of Bloom County, maybe. Who else?)
Other things I that make me love The Boondocks: Because I grew up reading Curtis in our local paper (the Boston Globe), and, even though I always felt vaguely like it was good for me, and it was undoubtedly salutary to see one comic strip that represented brick walls and city streets, Curtis operates, let's face it, on the intellectual level of Garfield. Because I like that the black characters in The Boondocks come in different colors -- something I had seen for the very first time only in Milestone comics, starting in 1993. Because it is vitally important and somewhat revelational for everyone to be exposed to scenes, conversations, even entire storylines in which there are no white people (a factor that, I'm pretty sure, made many white reader uncomfortable, for the same reasons that many readers were deeply disturbed and others overwhelmingly delighted by Alison Bechdel's epic comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which presented a group of main characters and their entire functional community in which -- gasp! -- there were hardly any men.) Because -- and I admit I feel vaguely uncomfortable about admitting this -- I love McGruder's use of colloquial black dialect among his characters, outside and within their homes. Black English is beautiful, rich and flexible, often deeply funny, and though I can listen to it on TV or radio or the movies, or in the world around me, I don't get to see it written very often.* Comics are a terrific crossroads medium, where non-written dialects can get full play in a way they seldom do on the page, and I love to see that written down, I love the way McGruder deploys its richness (often for humor value, admittedly) so I can read it in my own mind.
I guess that's all I have to say about this compilation -- or, at least, it's all I can think of for now. I'm putting McGruder's other books on my to-read list, though, that's for damn sure.
*That said: it has occurred to me that if I read more, or indeed any, of what people around here call "urban literature," I might see more of it. Most of the books I've seen for sale that fall under this category don't look very appealing to me: among other things, there seems to be a lack of imagination in the language and a quantity of typographical mistakes that shock my book-loving soul. Might anyone happen to have any recommendations?
[tags I would add if I could: i: mcgruder aaron, assimilation, children [*not* "children's"], humor, popular culture]
2003, Three Rivers Press
This is hilarious. I remember reading The Boondocks on and off while it was running in newspapers (more off than on; I was moving around a lot and not all my papers carried it), and I remember being sometimes impressed but often lukewarm on it. I remember formulating the impression that it was presumably the strip's controversy value and what Amazon somewhat coyly calls its "notoriety" that made it such a big success. (What "notoriety" means here is, among other things, visibly black characters talking about visible black issues, often with no white people in sight(!), and, with enormous daring, going so far as to claim the aforementioned right to be hostile. In America's newspapers! In the funny pages!)
Anyway, reading this compilation, I'm forced to dramatically revise my opinion. This is fabulous stuff. McGruder's incisiveness, cutting wit, characterization and sense of timing are often nothing short of brilliant. The strip really does bring to mind the eminent predecessors McGruder cites as influences in the foreword (Trudeau, Watterson, Breathed). (All of which leaves me unsure why I didn't find the strip quite so awesome at the time, except that it does come to mind that collections allow authors the luxury of picking and choosing; McGruder may have wisely left out a lot of duds. ;)
Anyway. What is awesome about this strip? Well, I mean, first, a lot of the things I've previously mentioned, in terms of the sharpness, character consistency and rhythm. (McGruder's art skills aren't all that, but Garry Trudeau proved that a sufficiently clever word-oriented cartoonist can overcome that, and McGruder's art was both stronger and more consistent than Trudeau's from the start. Also: the manga-influenced style he uses to render these young black kids in the suburbs? A gorgeous syncretism, that, I think, could not have been better timed or placed when he started his run in the late '90s.)
Also, McGruder's protagonist Huey is a great character. He is a ten-year-old cute kid, and he never smiles. Good Lord, people! Have you ever thought about how hard it is to win the audience's sympathy for a protagonist who never smiles?! This is tantamount to the challenge Steve Ditko and Stan Lee faced back in the early '60s when they had the brilliant idea of introducing a character whose entire face is covered by a mask -- Ditko had to work hard to make Spider-Man's body language convey his emotions! And McGruder, like Trudeau, accomplished the same thing using the relatively very few tools at his disposal: the tilt of an eyebrow, and words. Huey's a brilliant accomplishment, I tell you: absolutely brilliant.
(Um... {cough} I may be a little geeky, on the technical/historical side, about comics. Now you know.)
Anyway, and of course it is quite interesting and important that Huey doesn't smile. Neither does Riley, his media-brainwashed eight-year-old brother; and their grandfather, who is their parental figure, does so very seldom. This matters, because even if Riley's reason for never smiling is idiotic (he's practicing his "thug mug," even though HE IS EIGHT), Huey doesn't smile because he's obsessed with matters of history, politics, and social in/justice. He's a ten-year-old who knows too much to smile. And that -- even though, granted, Huey's over-the-top intensity is periodically lampooned and undermined, mostly by his more even-keeled best friend Caesar -- that is a huge, subtle, and important statement, all by itself.
(When else have the comics had so introspective, and so depressed, a child protagonist? Charlie Brown; Milo of Bloom County, maybe. Who else?)
Other things I that make me love The Boondocks: Because I grew up reading Curtis in our local paper (the Boston Globe), and, even though I always felt vaguely like it was good for me, and it was undoubtedly salutary to see one comic strip that represented brick walls and city streets, Curtis operates, let's face it, on the intellectual level of Garfield. Because I like that the black characters in The Boondocks come in different colors -- something I had seen for the very first time only in Milestone comics, starting in 1993. Because it is vitally important and somewhat revelational for everyone to be exposed to scenes, conversations, even entire storylines in which there are no white people (a factor that, I'm pretty sure, made many white reader uncomfortable, for the same reasons that many readers were deeply disturbed and others overwhelmingly delighted by Alison Bechdel's epic comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, which presented a group of main characters and their entire functional community in which -- gasp! -- there were hardly any men.) Because -- and I admit I feel vaguely uncomfortable about admitting this -- I love McGruder's use of colloquial black dialect among his characters, outside and within their homes. Black English is beautiful, rich and flexible, often deeply funny, and though I can listen to it on TV or radio or the movies, or in the world around me, I don't get to see it written very often.* Comics are a terrific crossroads medium, where non-written dialects can get full play in a way they seldom do on the page, and I love to see that written down, I love the way McGruder deploys its richness (often for humor value, admittedly) so I can read it in my own mind.
I guess that's all I have to say about this compilation -- or, at least, it's all I can think of for now. I'm putting McGruder's other books on my to-read list, though, that's for damn sure.
*That said: it has occurred to me that if I read more, or indeed any, of what people around here call "urban literature," I might see more of it. Most of the books I've seen for sale that fall under this category don't look very appealing to me: among other things, there seems to be a lack of imagination in the language and a quantity of typographical mistakes that shock my book-loving soul. Might anyone happen to have any recommendations?
[tags I would add if I could: i: mcgruder aaron, assimilation, children [*not* "children's"], humor, popular culture]