Mike Peters: Will Boondocks Return?

One of the few daily newspaper writers with a column devoted to comics, Mike Peters notes in a piece about his paper's latest survey that Aaron McGruder, on hiatus from his Boondocks feature, has yet to announce a return date and saw the latest order expand on his animated show version of the strip increase from 15 to 25. Daily Cartoonist smartly recalls this news that only 1/3 of the feature's client papers have been carrying the strip during the hiatus. Editor & Publisher talks to his syndicate, who say they don't have a re-start date but hope to have one by next week.

I felt at the time of the hiatus announcement that there was a good chance McGruder might not come back. The cartoonist's displeasure with the reward/punishment ratio represented by the pressures of daily production and the fickle nature of newspaper audiences has long been an underlying theme of his interviews. Also, Boondocks was never a runaway hit -- it was a solid, super-successful performer very quickly, but at 1/3 its client papers that's not to my mind a feature that would easily sustain a studio situation were McGruder to want to go the Walker/Davis path. Of course, now that it's counter-intuitive, I'm sort of more confident the cartoonist will return, and he certainly exudes star power in a way no one in strips has since Garry Trudeau.
 
posted 10:06 pm PST | Permalink
 

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