Update: Aaron McGruder, Boondocks

A few things popped out at me late yesterday as press coverage cycled through on cartoonist Aaron McGruder declining to give Universal Press Syndicate a firm date for his return to Boondocks, effectively moving the popular comic strip from six-month to semi-permanent hiatus.

* Articles like this one are giving a late-November date for the syndicate to actually end the current reprints. Given the six-week window with which syndicates prefer to allow their production bureaus to work, this is a pretty quick wrap-up of the current offering.

* I'm not certain that we'd have seen an announcement like this 10-20 years ago; the newspaper strip landscape is a lot more fluid now, and keeping Boondocks alive even to get to the next Universal offering window would have been a more obvious disservice to UPS's client papers than it might have been once upon a time.

* There's some commentary out there hinging on this article, where McGruder's longtime editor notes that the cartoonist had for years a problem with deadlines and therefore the additional pressure of a TV show had little to do with the hiatus. I found that odd for a pair of reasons. One, everyone in comics knows McGruder struggled with the workload; he talked about it a lot, and eventually hired an illustrator. Two, the logic is weird: if you've been struggling with deadlines for a long time, having an entirely new job likely adds to that struggle. I don't think anyone suggested something like "he was 100 percent fine until he got that TV show; the TV show is the cause of all the problems."

Let's face it. No one knows except McGruder and those close to him what's driving his recent moves. But if there were no television show, and the strip were still in 300 newspapers, our surprise at McGruder's decision to not even attempt a studio-supervised strip would increase ten-fold.

By the way, if this is the end for Boondocks, I join those who have expressed their happiness for McGruder. His feature had a successful run by any measure and its accomplishments would only have increased incrementally if the strip had stuck around for another 31 years. Besides, no one should have to stay in the same job they got right out of school, even if it's a choice one.
 
posted 10:06 pm PST | Permalink
 

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