Comic N the Hood

Two

African-American brothers reluctantly move to a white suburb with their grandfather. "What is that smell?" asks Riley, a pint-size gangsta wannabe, as they stroll through the leafy hood. "Clean air," deadpans Huey, his eight-year-old brother. "My guess is we'll get used to it eventually."

But Riley and Huey, stars of the brash new comic strip The Boondocks, show no signs of getting used to the "unholy land" of the melanin-challenged. And their white neighbors offer anything but an easy welcome. Huey, named for former Black Panther Huey P. Newton, sees a man washing his car and shrieks in terror, "It's Bull Connor with a fire hose!" Later he starts a one-boy "Klanwatch." Cindy, a pony-tailed blond, can't believe her Afro-crowned neighbor, Jazmine, is half-black: "I just figured you were having a really bad hair day."

Can America get used to The Boondocks? Just two months after its national debut, newspapers in 195 cities have signed up for the strip, one of the biggest launches in comics history. But protests from readers, both black and white, have shown that many are not ready to laugh at their own prejudices. "Not all black people are hoodlums," wrote a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel subscriber. Others see the strip as antiwhite. "I think you should offer David Dukes equal room," fumed an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reader. Two small papers, in Aiken, S.C., and Massilon, Ohio, have canceled the strip. "Our readers couldn't see the humor," said Scott Hunter, publisher of the Aiken Standard.

That is no surprise to Aaron McGruder, the 25-year-old African American who created The Boondocks for his student newspaper at the University of Maryland. The strip, he says, "requires people to go outside their comfort zone." Born in Chicago, McGruder grew up in Columbia, Md., where he dealt with "the intimidation of being one of two or three black faces in a sea of faces that don't look like you." He still works out of his bedroom in his parents' split-level ranch house, his collection of Star Wars toys strewn about. Besides "an addiction to dry Life cereal," he confesses on his website ) to having "no BMW, no Benz, not a single article of clothing from Versace or FUBU, and no life as a result." That may soon change; his first check from the Universal Press Syndicate, where he has a six-figure contract, arrived last week.

Newspapers see The Boondocks as a way to attract younger readers turned off by the blandness of most comics pages. With its hip-hop references, its Japanese manga-style drawings and its candid discussion of race, "the strip speaks to Aaron's generation the way Doonesbury speaks to boomers," says syndicate executive Lee Salem. Perhaps for that reason, the strip has drawn complaints on more than just racial grounds. In one strip Riley whacks Cindy with a toy light saber. "See?!!! You're still alive!!" he complains. "This thing is worthless!!" McGruder was stunned by the howls of outrage from readers, who cited the Littleton school shooting and the climate of media violence. "There's a double standard," he protests. "Calvin, in Calvin and Hobbes, abuses a little girl, shoots guns, orders explosives and imagines blowing up his elementary school. Calvin does things I could never do with a black character because people are scared of black males."

So far, most newspaper editors are rallying behind The Boondocks. Readers who don't appreciate it suffer from "irony deficiency," wrote columnist Kristin Tillotson in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, where letters at first ran 8 to 1 against the strip: "The Boondocks exposes racial issues alive and festering under the rug of polite society." McGruder says he's exploring "those murky depths where you're trying to figure out what's racism, what's ignorance, what's naivete." When an old white lady pats Riley on the head and calls him "cutie pie," the boy responds angrily that he's "nobody's pet Negro." Neither is McGruder.