Yeah, he came up with a drawing of a perpetually frowning, bitter, cynical, and caustic teenage black kid and that image is used simply to convey an attitude. The cartoonist gets away with a five-panel strip and I have never seen one that is funny. I get the impression the cartoonist is lazy. Occasionally the strips come off as "too clever by half", but they are never insightful or thought-provoking. Heck, if the guy was any good he would at least make me mad. But he's a lightweight and he can't even do that.
Like most people, I suppose, I have my six or seven strips I check out and the rest don't even exist.
Fact is, there are several excellent black cartoonists out there, but McGruder is not one of them. But he is a black cartoonist and that makes him a perfect "affirmative action" hire for many liberal newspapers.
My advice: brush him off like a fly - - he's nobody.
My thoughts exactly.
"Curtis" "Jump Start" and "Herb and Jamal" are some of the best written and drawn strips out there. But because they aren't radical cultural critics of the Spike Lee school, they don't get the attention Boring McBooger gets.
Incidentaly, 'toon historians have confirmed that George "Krazy Kat" Herrmann, possibly the greatest cartoonist of all time, had African-American ancestry.