In the sleepy, tranquil nursing home that is the daily comics page, Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks is a scowling B-boy with a boombox blaring Public Enemy. McGruder's strip, about two angry black kids who move into their granddad's suburban home, has always divided readers. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, some of the strip's strongest criticism came from fans who accused McGruder of abandoning the thematic and visual sophistication of the strip's early days and turning it into a crude soapbox on which to fire direct shots at the Bush administration. Admirers, meanwhile, hailed McGruder's more confrontational direction, praising it as a vital source of dissent that brought urgency back to comic strips.
For the past few years, McGruder has juggled the daily strip with regular engagements on the lecture circuit and attempts to adapt The Boondocks for television. The Boondocks finally hit the small screen as part of Cartoon Network's cultishly adored Adult Swim block with both its confrontational, hip-hop-derived sense of outrage and anime-inspired look intact. The A.V. Club recently spoke with McGruder about being typecast as an angry guy, why the American political system is hopelessly broken, and why being one of People magazine's 50 Most Eligible Bachelors isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The A.V. Club: You've been developing this show for four or five years. What took it so long to finally make it onto the air?
Aaron McGruder: I don't even know if it's that abnormal. Some shows just take a really long time. In my case, it was just finding the right home. We went around with several places over five or six years until the deal with Sony happened, and then Fox and Adult Swim. But, you know, it was largely creative-control issues.
AVC: What kind of creative-control issues?
AM: Well, just not having it. That's an issue. It's not the norm when creators have any protections with regards to creative control. And so it took some time, I think, for the strip to gain enough popularity where I had enough leverage to come in and say, "It has to be done in a certain way or it's not going to be done at all," and then have people willing to put up with that who were ultimately paying for it. You know, for them to be willing to kind of concede those kind of things. It just takes time, you know?
AVC: What happened with Fox, specifically?
AM: We did our best to do a Fox show, but, frankly, I don't think the difficulties we had at Fox would be exclusive to Fox, I just think broadcast television in general is a very restrictive place. It's tough to be funny, because there's so many eyeballs and there's so much money at stake that I think everything is just kind of over-thought. And it's tough to be daring and do something different, either with regards to content or even structure. It's really a rigid landscape. And you can honestly see it in the show.
AVC: How is the show as developed for Fox different than the Adult Swim show?
AM: I think it's a different show. We did the best we could to do a good Fox show for Fox, but obviously you're bound by the restrictions of Fox and primetime and all of that. And so I think we tell a lot more interesting stories and I think we do it in a more interesting way on a cable show. And then, obviously, there's a million things we're allowed to say on late-night cable that you're not allowed to say on a primetime broadcast.
AVC: Within the first minute and a half of the first episode I saw, Huey talks about Jesus being a black man, Ronald Reagan being the devil, and the government lying about Sept. 11. Kind of throwing down the gauntlet there, eh?
AM: I think people were a little bit too concerned about what I would or would not be allowed to say. So let me just get that out of the way and get on to the business of telling, you know, a story, or two, or three, or 15. And also to say, "Okay, look. Here it is, don't worry about it. The restrictions and the watered-down and all the stuff that you thought was gonna happen really isn't the case." So we done got that out the way, and now we can just kind of move on.
AVC: On the show, Huey and Riley look and sound adorable. Do you think you can get away with more because they're so cute?
AM: I think that's always been part of the thinking behind the script, that—and I really tried really hard to impress that upon the staff of the show, the animation staff—to try to get them to understand that we would only be able to get away with what we were writing if the visuals were appealing enough that it was like a balance, and even people who didn't like what they were hearing would still not want to turn away because what they were seeing was so nice. So that was kind of my hunch, and I think it worked. I'm hoping it does.
AVC: What was the hardest part of adapting The Boondocks for television?
AM: I think it was going from working completely by myself to working with, not just a team of people, but really, several teams. Writers, producers, the artists, the illustrators, the designers, and, you know, overseas. I mean, it's small compared to what we would need to do the kind of show that we tried to do, but even at small numbers it's way more people than I'm used to working with.
AVC: Reginald Hudlin is one of the executive producers of The Boondocks. What do you think he brings to your partnership?
AM: Uh, we don't have a partnership anymore. Reginald Hudlin left the show at the end of the Fox pilot. He is now running BET, and I have not spoken with him in over a year. We have a contractual obligation to give him a credit.
AVC: So what are you feeling angriest about these days?
AM: I'm actually kind of angriest about the fact that everybody keeps saying how angry I am.
AVC: You feel like you're kind of pigeonholed in that respect?
AM: I do the interviews and then I read about myself. I understand it and I get what it is. But there's so much stuff that I say, either jokingly or lightheartedly, that gets printed like I'm dead serious. I'm kind of conscious and aware of how ridiculous everyone involved with politics or talking about politics, especially on television, is—all the shouting matches and the screaming and the over-the-top personalities, and everyone's just playing. It's like WWF for news, almost. It's really ridiculous and I really don't want to be a part of it, and I'm not trying to put on this persona of this angry revolutionary to get people to follow me.
I just tell jokes, and I think a lot of people take it too seriously. It's not that I don't have things that I'm angry about in the world, and I think most decent human beings are upset about things, and even upset about things in their own country, but I'm not a particularly unhappy fellow. I think I'm happy with the show, and I think it's funny and I'm optimistic about it. What's on my mind, what's kind of bugging me, is clearly visible in the strip and in the show, but I still manage to joke about it. [Laughs.] I really get a little bit confused by all this "angry angry angry" talk when all I do is tell jokes and at least some people find it funny.
AVC: Do you feel like the comic strip is a dying art form?
AM: Yeah, I've always felt that way. I felt that way when I got in it, and I was fortunate that I was able to get in before it died. But I do think comics are a dying art form because newspapers are a dying medium. But it's not to say that in the next generation, where there's people getting their news electronically, comics won't survive. Right now, they're still largely attached to the newspaper world. And the more they can break away from that, the more they have a chance to live on.
AVC: How do you feel about living in Los Angeles?
AM: I think there's a lot of good and bad to L.A. One of the things you have to consider is that you can, if you're lucky, make a decent living here. That's a big plus. That's pretty positive. The weather is OK. I don't like the smog very much, but there are some days when L.A. is just very, very beautiful. I hate the traffic, but I don't really commute very far, so that doesn't bother me too much. The biggest thing that I don't like about L.A. is the sort of 2 a.m. shutdown of everything. It really kind of stagnates the nightlife. It's very hard to casually have fun in Los Angeles. If you want to go out and have fun it's like a full-time job, you have to really prepare, and call ahead, and get on a list, and know somebody... It's really rough to relax here.
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