[150 years ago this week, the New York Daily Graphic debuted the first comic strip to appear in an American newspaper. So in honor of that anniversary, this week I’ll blog about that strip and four other examples of how the medium has evolved, leading up to a special weekend post highlighting other ComicsStudiers!]
On two contrasting
but complementary ways the turn of the 21C strip broke new ground.
First
things first: Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks (1996-2006) was by no means
the first syndicated daily comic strip to focus on African American characters.
From what I can tell, that honor goes in part to John Saunders and Al
McWilliams’s relatively short-lived Dateline:
Danger! (1968-1974), which was inspired by the TV show I Spy and so
featured one Black spy and one white spy as its main characters; that strip was
followed closely by two longer-running daily strips that more fully focused on
Black protagonists, Brumsic
Brandon Jr.’s Luther (1968-1986) and Ted
Shearer’s Quincy (1970-1986). Each of those examples is unique
and interesting and worth its own extended analysis beyond these brief mentions—especially
Luther and Quincy, which were at least as groundbreaking in their
focus on African American children within a long-established genre and medium
as was Ezra Jack
Keats’s The Snowy Day (1963), and of course did so across many,
many more pages than could a short children’s book—and I hope to have the
chance to revisit them for future posts in this space.
While The
Boondocks—which was initially published
online in 1996, then in the hip hop magazine The
Source beginning in 1997, and then nationally syndicated beginning in April 1999—thus
wasn’t the first syndicated comic strip to focus on African American characters,
it still featured a groundbreaking variety and depth of community. Those
earlier strips had largely featured young Black characters living in the inner
city, while McGruder took his two young protagonists, brothers Huey and Riley
Freeman, out to a predominantly white suburb, allowing for multilayered
examinations of race, childhood, education, community, and more. And McGruder
also included a much broader range of Black characters, including the boys’
grandfather and caretaker Robert (a WWII veteran with a decidedly more
conservative point of view than Huey), Huey’s best friend Caesar, his
mixed-race young neighbor Jazmine, and many more, which allowed the strip to
explore those same themes within the African American community in depth. To
use literary critical terms, The Boondocks offered a level of social
realism that I don’t know if any of these earlier strips could match.
At the same
time, this was a comic strip; while that doesn’t always or necessarily equate
to humor as a primary goal, there’s a reason they call them the funny pages. And
when it came to the strip’s more comedic elements, McGruder often veered away
from the purely realistic and toward the satirical with a heavy dose of the absurd.
To name two distinct but equally telling examples: there was the series of strips
“Condi Needs a Man,”
where Huey and Caesar create a personal ad for then-Secretary of State
Condoleeza Rice, describing
her as a “female Darth Vader type that seeks loving male to torture”; or,
to connect this week’s series to the historic anniversary we’ve just passed,
there was the post-9/11
series of strips where McGruder featured a talking yellow ribbon (Ribbon) and
American flag (Flagee) to challenge the moment’s embrace of blind patriotism.
In many ways these satirical absurdities reflected Huey’s own perspective,
making it a level of psychological realism to complement the social realism;
but they also made sure this comic strip was as engaged with its historical and
social contexts as Doonesbury or any strip, and even stronger for that
extra layer.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Comic strips you’d highlight?
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