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The Boondocks, 1/16/05

Did you ever notice that whenever Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared in public, he almost always wore a suit? Well, Aaron McGruder (or a member of the team of artists over at Boondocks Enterprises) apparently did. I’ve always noticed that as well, which is why this cartoon amused me as much as it did with its departure from the seemingly iron-clad halo-and-wings-and-flowing-robes conventional cartoon depiction of the dearly departed. The contours of the suit make the fanny-shaking in panels two and five all the funnier.

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Peanuts, 10/28/04

The Boondocks, 10/28/04

When I was a kid, I learned a lot from the comics. For instance, I had a bunch of Peanuts anthologies that I read obsessively, and they taught me about how to be melancholy. Take sighing: from strips like the one above, I learned the precise emotional and conversational situations in which a sigh would be appropriate. Unfortunately, I had no idea what a sigh actually was, which meant that, when the mood struck, I would actually say the word “sigh.” This went on for years with no one older and wiser correcting me, presumably because it’s pretty hilarious to see a little kid going around saying “sigh.” Come to think of it, that probably accounts for a lot of Peanuts’ appeal. I add the Boondocks strip here as evidence that this trend is still going strong.

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The Boondocks, 9/30/04

Like a lot of us, The Boondocks has been in a more or less constant state of seething political rage for the past four years. Which is fine as far as it goes — there’s a lot of funny that comes out of angry. But it’s been too bad that the strip has jettisoned a lot of its cast in the process and become something of a daily diatribe. Some of the funniest Boondocks series have focused on the supporting cast (e.g., Tom getting kicked out of his house after his wife voted for Nader, Riley humiliated when his family found out that he listens to Lauren Hill).

Anyway, the strip has never shied away from doing meta strips-about-the-strips stuff, so it’s nice that in the process of reintroducing a long-missing character, the fact that she’s been long-missing is acknowledged in a funny way. It also takes the fact that everyone’s the same age all the time and turns it from an oddity into another joke.