Ironic or Insulting?

Aaron McGruder doesn’t get what all the fuss is about.

But from his bedroom in the basement of his parents’ house in Columbia, Md., the 25-year-old creator of “The Boondocks” comic strip has become the center of a swirling controversy.

“The Boondocks” was launched on April 19 and already appears in 173 newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, and on 22 online sites. It brings something almost never seen on the comics page: a biting satire on issues of race and class.

And not all its readers like what they see.

McGruder insists there is nothing offensive about the strip.

“People take it at face value, and don’t get the irony,” he says. “The difference is meant to be subtle, but you can see it if you look.”

A typical day in “The Boondocks” features a handful of black kids who move out of Chicago’s inner city and arrive, aghast, in white suburbia. They include Huey, a bantamweight black nationalist who hopes to join a neighborhood Klanwatch; Riley, Huey’s younger brother, a posturing, would-be gangsta who, in one episode, cracks a toy light saber over the head of a white girl; and racially mixed Jazmine, who fervently denies having an afro even as it bursts out of her tightly drawn ponytail like a pompon.

The lesser characters are every bit as provocative. Take Jazmine’s father, who tries to shield his daughter from her own ethnicity, or Cindy, a white girl who gleefully expects her new black neighbors to be either rap artists or basketball players.

“I’ve pored over this strip a thousand times,” McGruder says. “There’s really nothing offensive about it.”

Nevertheless, “The Boondocks” has encountered what its distributor, Universal Press Syndicate in Kansas City, Mo., calls an “unusually high amount of resistance.” Many newspapers running the strip have received complaints from readers. Several papers have moved the strip to the opinion page, and one has discontinued it.

To date, the Los Angeles Times has received about 100 letters of complaint, many from readers such as Judi Kessler, a 49-year-old researcher in the sociology department at UC Santa Barbara who claims the strip is filled with hateful, even violent images.

“This is a depiction of angry black children bent on killing,” says Kessler, who says she has subscribed to The Times for more than 20 years but will cancel her subscription if the strip is not pulled.

“I was,” she says, “trying to find some political or social value or even humor, and couldn’t.”

A Way to Get

People Thinking

McGruder maintains that “The Boondocks” is meant to get people thinking about race in a constructive way. And, while the strip pokes fun at both its black and white characters, he says it’s never meant to demean.

The characters, he says, are not based upon anyone in particular, least of all himself. However, McGruder, who is black, also was born in Chicago and, like his characters, left the city for the suburbs. When he was 6, his family moved to Champaign, Ill., and then to Louisville, Ky., before settling in Columbia in 1980.

Always an avid drawer, McGruder began taking the craft seriously after high school, while attending the University of Maryland. There, he majored in Afro-American studies, learned computer graphics and developed the idea for “The Boondocks.”

The strip first appeared in the college newspaper, the Diamondback, where it was an immediate success.

“You have a demographic of 18- to 24-year-olds who are pretty much offended by nothing,” McGruder notes.

He then took the strip on the Internet, where it ran for nearly two years before he shopped it to the nine major comic strip syndicates. The syndicates, which receive thousands of submissions each year, serve as gatekeepers for artists who hope to get their work onto the newspaper comics pages.

McGruder says most of the syndicates praised him for his artwork and writing but passed on “The Boondocks,” saying they were afraid its edgy tone wouldn’t mix well on the characteristically prosaic comics pages.

Strip Introduced

at Conference

His luck changed when he brought the strip directly to newspaper editors at the National Assn. of Black Journalists in 1997. There he met Harriet Choice, a vice president at Universal Press who had never seen “The Boondocks” but was immediately impressed. After speaking with McGruder for nearly an hour, she lobbied hard for him to be offered a contract.

“We were impressed by his writing and his insights and his art,” recalls Lee Salem, the syndicate’s 52-year-old vice president and editorial director. “He was very talented at 22. And he’s going to be even more talented as he matures.”

Last December, Universal Press signed McGruder to a five-year contract and launched “The Boondocks” to more newspapers than either “Calvin and Hobbs” or “For Better or Worse,” its previous two most successful launches.

But some readers, including Barbara Aspenson of Los Angeles, don’t share the syndicate’s enthusiasm. The 63-year-old real estate agent has written letters to The Times and the NAACP about the comic strip and says she would eagerly join an anti-”Boondocks” coalition if such a group exists.

Aspenson, who includes Jeff Foxworthy and Bill Cosby among her favorite comedians, condemns “The Boondocks” for reinforcing negative stereotypes about blacks.

McGruder is unfazed by the criticism, however, even when it comes from other blacks.

“They want a color-blind society,” he says, “rather than one that respects and acknowledges differences.”

He also thinks that if the characters were white, such as those in “Calvin and Hobbs,” fewer people would complain.

“Moe was kicking Calvin’s butt every day,” McGruder says. “He’d be there, beat up in the corner, and that was the end of the strip. Ha-ha. But nobody said anything. My characters look at you sideways and people are crying foul.”

Although some newspapers moved “The Boondocks” to the opinion page after the light saber episode, one paper, the Aiken Standard in South Carolina (circulation 15,000), had seen enough. It reported receiving “dozens” of reader complaints and dropped the strip May 24.

According to John Lindsay, the Los Angeles Times’ managing editor for features, The Times has no plans to discontinue the strip and values the unique perspective it brings to the comics page.

Other editors and reporters were shown and liked the strip, added Lindsay, who said he wants “the comics pages to be more inclusive.”

McGruder says that he is one of just five black comic strip artists in syndication and that he does not intend “to waste the opportunity by not challenging people.

“White television and films have always been good. But black audiences get ‘Booty Call’ or ‘Malcolm & Eddie.’ Nobody needs another lame strip.”

Universal’s Salem reminds readers that McGruder is just starting out and that both he and his characters will mature. Some upcoming episodes, Salem says, deal with back-to-school issues that are anything but offensive.

Meanwhile, McGruder says that the strip has plenty of supporters and that he receives between 15 and 20 e-mails a day from readers urging him not to change a thing.

“I know the papers are getting some heat,” he says, “but I’m getting all the love.”

Mark Smythe of Yorba Linda is one such admirer. The 49-year-old father of two mixed-race daughters, 8 and 10, says his family loves the strip, in part because Jazmine deals with the same issues his daughters know all too well.

“The issue of hair and what to do with it has really been important with us,” Smythe says. “And so has the notion that every black person must be a rapper.”

Smythe doesn’t worry about his daughters reading “The Boondocks” without supervision because, he says, people underestimate children’s ability to pick up on satire, and, after all, “It’s only a comic strip.”

Sam Bruchey can be reached by e-mail at socalliving@latimes.com.