Aaron McGruder

Another fine collection of an improving strip. Huey and Riley Freeman are young black boys who have been sent to live in the suburbs with their Grandad, a stern, often clueless and never maudlin retiree. Huey is intelligent, angry at today's political foofaraw, non-jovial, ironic, cynical, and someday will either be a senator or a Black Panther. Younger brother Riley is a wanna-be thug who will die young, probably knows that and is okay with it. The strips are smart, clever, funny, and show more require a familiarity with culture (white and black) that sometimes goes beyond mine. I'm also becoming enamored with Huey's friend (probably his only one) Caesar, and I'm glad to see Jazmine return. I wish, probably fruitlessly, that McGruder would allow some kind of affection to flow from Huey to Jazmine. The strip could use a little softening or humanizing, but McGruder probably holds it as a matter of pride not to do so. Perhaps he's right. show less

McGruder (Boondocks) and Hudlin (House Party) teamed up for a movie script that turned out to be unproduceable, and so turned it into a graphic novel.

We begin with the voter disenfranchisement of the 2004 U.S. presidential election (except all veiled-like and names-changed, except not THAT veiled, because the illustrator didn't attempt to disguise Bush, Powell, Rice, Cheney, et al). Illinois is the pivotal state in this version of the election, which makes the voter disenfranchisement in show more East St. Louis the determining factor in the election's outcome. (That reveal-sequence was visceral and powerful---goosebumps, I had.) The Mayor of East St. Louis takes the matter to the Supreme Court and gets a can't-stop-losing-for-winning ruling (yes, disenfranchisement happened; no, it's not worth doing anything about). East St. Louis responds by seceding from the United States.

What follows is a breakneck roller-coaster ride of intrigue, power, money, politics, double-crossing, back-stabbing, chickening-out, and stepping up. Plus a lot of affectionate satire about the people of East St. Louis. Teh awesome.

I quibble with the final page---I think that Blackland would become another Taiwan---but hey, I think that the final ten minutes of most movies should be skipped. Some reviewers also charge that there's a sexism problem here, which, yeah, there is: the book has a bad case of the suspense/thriller genre's double-crossing sex-diva. But Kabilah, our spunky college activist---who, in trio with our spunky guerrilla-activist Nala and the power-brokering sex-diva herself, manages to save the day several times over---makes me all kinds of happy. Which is all to say that while I had my doubts about the portrayal of women during the first third of the book, McGruder and Co. had made me happy again by the final third. show less

Reading this book is what got me started wondering when I'd see some new strips. The Boondocks are an awesome stealth weapon; McGruder consistently skewers politics and pop culture in three panels more deftly than a host of polibloggers do in thousands of words. "Public Enemy" is only 1/3 the size of its predecessor "A Right To Be Hostile," which is a shame, because it's where he'd finally found his voice.

It's a screenplay that could never, ever, ever get made into a movie - yeah, Hollywood's not going to leap right on a movie about East St. Louis seceding from the U.S. - so they made a comic out of it. Not the most feminist comic in the world, but hilarious and awesome anyway.