NYT: The Comic-Strip Revolution Will Be Televised (The Boondocks) [View All]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/arts/television/30ogun.html


The Comic-Strip Revolution Will Be Televised

By LOLA OGUNNAIKE
Published: October 30, 2005

Los Angeles

FANS fearing that "The Boondocks," the wildly scathing, racially charged comic strip, will lose its bite when it appears on television next week need not worry. Within the first 10 seconds of the new show of the same name, viewers will be offered the following Molotov cocktail of social criticism: "Jesus is black, Ronald Reagan is the devil and the government is lying about 9/11."

Since its national debut six years ago, the strip, about two black children living in white suburbia, has slaughtered its share of sacred cows, eviscerating everyone from Condoleezza Rice and Strom Thurmond to 50 Cent and Ralph Nader. President Bush has been a frequent target. As a result, the strip has been suspended, banished to editorial pages and dropped from some newspapers (it currently appears in more than 300).

Trying to translate that incendiary spirit into great television will be a challenge, an expensive challenge at that. Cartoon Network pays Sony Pictures Television, producer of the series, an estimated license fee of $400,000 per episode. Add to that the millions the network has spent on marketing, including many billboards in New York and Los Angeles trumpeting the show's premiere on Nov. 6 in the late-night "Adult Swim" block, and "The Boondocks" becomes the most expensive show the network has made.

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Standing just over 5 feet 7, Mr. McGruder is a slight, handsome man with small features and slim hands. Dressed in jeans, a Stevie Wonder T-shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, the cartoonist could easily pass for a bookish high school sophomore. Unlike his alter ego, Huey, whose face is all furrowed brow and self-righteous scowl, Mr. McGruder is quick to smile. One afternoon this month, he was brimming with opinions. Mr. McGruder on Senator Barack Obama's chances of ever sitting in the Oval Office: "He's not even going to be able to smell the White House unless he's a member of Skull and Bones or any of those close-knit secret societies that really aren't so secret anymore." Regarding the rapper Kanye West's recent remark that Mr. Bush doesn't care about black people: "If you're black and you don't know that by now, you're in trouble. I think it's time that poor whites start realizing that George Bush doesn't care about them either and he will let them die too."

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I've never watched the Cartoon Network, but I think I will for this.