[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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