Poison Kitchen points to Michael Moore’s loving tribute to “The Boondocks,” which, I have to admit, is about the only bitingly funny cartoon on most funny pages these days. Moore uses the piece to pound home his favorite political points but manages to miss why “The Boondocks” is a great comic strip: it’s not the digs at white folks that Moore craves; it’s the character of the characters Aaron McGruder draws.
Moore likes his world black and white — where the Man is always sticking it to the black folks — but McGruder’s world is a lot more colorful. His main characters represent urban ghetto culture seeping into the suburbs, one’s a wannabe revolutionary, the other’s a wannabe gangster. The rest of the cast, black and white alike, are constantly trying to talk sense into these two boys’ heads, with only marginal success.
It’s true McGruder uses his panels to notch political points, but it always seems to me he’s hanging back a bit and willingly letting his characters’ contradictions undermine their diatribes. That’s what makes The Boondocks such a hoot, in my mind: McGruder subverts everything, even his own characters.
Moore could be that funny, I suppose, if he weren’t so busy trying to be the left-wing Limbaugh.