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[Link] The Boondocks [Date] 11/18/99 [Comments] 
This syndicated comic is one I've been dying to suggest for weeks. The main reason I have to point it out to those who may have missed it in the daily paper is that it's so funny! The main characters of this strip are black, and the author, Aaron McGruder, has no fear of finding humor in everyday situations that most white people are afraid even to admit to. I'm amazed that it's syndicated, much less in the Washington Post, and the sad thing is that the mere sight of this comic's characters seems to make a lot of people angry. If none of this bothers you, you'll find a comic with hilarious, often old-timey jokes, and characters so well explored that, you'll laugh out loud practically every day. The character descriptions provided by the author provide a lot of the clues to what's going on. For example, one of the main characters, Huey, is a young righteous "intellectual". He may seem at first like a mouthpiece for the cartoonist, but read a few comics and you'll notice that he's still as naive as his age, and his moody, cynical attitude is as likely to backfire up on him as to be right. Riley, his younger brother, is always trying to cop an attitude, often the funniest part of the strip. I loved the sequence where he repaints all the streetsigns! The interaction between Huey and Riley is surprisingly believable, sometimes touching. The grandfather is just that, often unfoolable by the kids but just as often pathetically unable to remember where he put his hat. Without belaboring the point, Aaron shows multiple sides of any character or situation, while all the time keeping the humor the focus of the comic. UExpress keeps a generous four months of archive on hand for The Boondocks; go right to it and read the earliest comic so that you don't miss any more than you have to! Aaron's own web site, once beautiful and for a while the home of this comic before it was syndicated, seems to be having HTML problems (I don't know why it always crashes my IE) as Aaron's production crew becomes busier with deadlines, interviews, and film deals, but is nonetheless the source for the latest news about the comic when accessable. Update 1/25/01Boondocks.net seems fine now; athough there's no comics there the weekly dirt on what Aaron's doing and the depressingly funny hate-mail reprints are worth checking out.
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