Hmmm……

NOT surprised—neither by the news, nor how he chose to make the break.

I prided myself on reading EVERY McGruder interview that ever came my way. In virtually every one that went beyond than 200 words, I remember him complaining about how grueling it was to do the strip. (Here’s the most in-depth profile of McGruder I’ve yet seen.) To do a comic strip was my original ambition, so I both sympathize with him AND feel he was whining all the way to the bank.

I guess in the 21st century, everything is just a platform to another platform; every spot someone gets is just a temporary space to nap while preparing their next (upward, hopefully) hustle. Ed Gordon and Tavis Smiley use National Public Radio as a forum to keep their very public profiles while setting up their television vehicles. Hiphop Gen stars Queen Latifah and Ananda Lewis were among many that fell into cookie-cutter syndicated daytime Tee Vee talk shows that came and went, but at least their demos haven’t forgotten them, Heaven forbid. 🙂 

Ultimately, McGruder—who wrote in the introduction of one of his “Boondocks” anthologies that he wanted to continue the strip because it kept a foot in The Man’s @ss—didn’t want to be Charles M. Schulz or Garry Trudeau. He had always wanted to leverage the characters and the concept into a Tee Vee deal, and he got a very successful one. So why kill yourself? I guess he thought. 

And, to be real, for the most part, it’s not like he wasn’t phoning it in for the last couple of years.

If you are going to miss the strip, get this collection and you’ll be straight. It’s the best of the early ones—those made when his full attention was on the task, the ones that came before the Tee Vee show jumped off.

Speaking of the Tee Vee show, here’s the first-season episode that I rank as one of the best Black half-hours of Tee Vee ever.

As these characters become more and more multi-media, we’ll see some of the characters he created that had yet to make the strip. We’ll see, but, sadly, we’ll no longer read.