Today, as we catch up on the calendar, we look at how the Boondocks explained that Santa Claus was yet another person who ripped off black culture.
It’s our annual Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day’s Advent calendar post, and it will display the Advent calendar with that given day’s door open, and you can see which will be the “gift” for this day! You can click here to see previous Advent calendar entries. This year, the theme is Christmas Stories in Comics! Each day will highlight a Christmas story from a notable comic strip (some strips will be featured here more than once. Some will appear as many as four or five times).
This year’s Advent calendar design, depicting Santa Claus handing out presents to the children in the cartoon (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, receives a present instead ), is Nick Benefits.He made it for the 2022 Advent Calendar, but since it also works for this year, I’m keeping it.
And now, Day 22 will be opened (once opened, the door will present an image from the featured comic story)…
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How did Huey and his brother come to live in “The Boondocks”?
As I noted a while ago, Aaron McGruder started the Bled as an online comic on Hitlist.com in 1996. She later began appearing in The source before McGruder struck a deal with Universal Press Syndicate and the comic got off to a HARD start in 1999. It had been a while since a new comic exploded in popularity in the same way that the Bled did. It was a real sensation from the start.
The strip follows the adventures of two young black children, Huey and Riley Freeman, who leave Chicago to live with their grandfather in Woodcrest, a predominantly white neighborhood. Their neighbors are Tom and Sarah Dubois and their daughter, Jazmine. Tom is black and Sarah is white, and Jazmine is a spirited girl who is pretty much the antithesis of Huey’s cynical nature.
Huey is a bright child who is extremely cynical and often makes vehement political statements. His younger brother, Riley, enjoys living a “thug life.” Their grandfather barely tolerates their eccentricities (and he is not afraid to use corporal punishment to keep them in line), but in general he is a compassionate and understanding guardian (hidden under much mockery and grabbing his belt, of course).
When the strip became popular (but before it was syndicated), McGruder wanted to turn it into a cartoon or comic strip. The comic book deal happened first, but in 2005 the TV show debuted on Adult Swim. McGruder deftly navigated a unique continuity between the comic and the cartoon, but after a while it was clear that the cartoon was going to take up most of his time, and the cartoon had the largest cultural footprint, so McGruder took a break from cartooning. comic strip which ultimately led to the comic’s cancellation in 2006 when it seemed clear that McGruder would not return. The cartoon last aired in 2014, with one season without McGruder’s participation. McGruder has been trying to revive the cartoon for years now, and it was such a great cartoon that I imagine it will eventually succeed.
In his first year on the nationally syndicated strip, McGruder featured TWO hilarious Santa conspiracies!
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For better or worse, the Christmas Angels plot showed why the comic was so acclaimed
Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse captured so many conflicting human emotions, and her Christmas Angel storyline was a perfect example.
What were the two Santa conspiracies in Boondocks’ first year?
The way Huey’s mind works is that he can’t help but react to someone’s optimism with something to tear them down. He doesn’t do it to be mean per se, but he also doesn’t care about the other person’s feelings. The one who had it the worst, by far, is Jazmine, because she really likes Huey, and she respects him, and he, in turn, uses that attention to tell her pretty much how he feels, knowing that her respect for him (mixed with a large dose of naivety) will lead him to believe it.
This is how he convinces her that Santa Claus is in fact a black man named Nick “Jolly” Jenkins who the world has co-opted as Santa Claus, thus erasing the black cultural aspect of Santa Claus…
Although it’s only the first year of the strip, Tom has already seen enough of Huey and the effect he has on his daughter, and he confronts Huey about Jolly Jenkins and, of course, Huey refuses to do any compromise to allow Tom to spend a merry Christmas at home with his wife and daughter…
However, while Huey is creating THIS conspiracy theory, he then stumbles upon a SECOND conspiracy theory, which is that Santa IS actually real and is in charge of the Illuminati!
It’s not that we’re supposed to take Huey seriously on many of his positions, but for this one we’re ESPECIALLY supposed to think he’s stupid, because both Grandpa AND Riley make fun of Huey about his stupid Santa conspiracy…
In a cute way, Huey also tries to report Santa to the cops to point out the hypocrisy of allowing a man to break into people’s homes with abandon…
Things change when Tom’s WIFE also walks in on Jolly Jenkins, and Tom admits defeat to Huey…
Great work by McGruder. He was a brilliant designer. Let’s hope he does more Bled material in the future!
If you have a suggestion for a good Christmas story from a daily newspaper strip, please let me know at brianc@cbr.com, and maybe I’ll use that strip as an example future for one of the others. 2 strips incoming!