By Tom Dodge
Dallas, TX – Okay. I can relax now, I guess. "The Boondocks" hasn't been canned. It has just been hidden, or moved - as the secretary at The Dallas Morning News told me - to page 5-C. They're going to get a little controversial, I was told. And the editors felt that these boys, meaning Huey, I think, are a bad influence on the children who read Peanuts, the lead comics on that page. So, it took two days but I finally found it. The boys were at the bottom of page 4-C, boxed in by the astrology chart on one side, "The Aces on Bridge" on the other, and just below a column on skin cancer in dogs.
In an editor's disclaimer, readers are told that "The Boondocks" is exploring topics felt to be inappropriate for the comics pages. In the offending panel, Huey is being his usual anti-establishmentarian self. He's opposed to going to war. The editors believe this is inappropriate for children. But all of us who understand Huey know that if the overwhelming majority were peacemakers, then Huey would come out for nuclear war. Huey is a precocious, alienated ghetto kid who has moved to the suburbs to live with his middle-class grandfather. Unlike his conventional-minded, popular-culture addicted younger brother, Riley, Huey is moralistic, conspiratorial, and uncompromising in his views. Riley is larcenous. Once he offered to carry an old lady's groceries for her, then ran home with them. He enjoys all the schlock that television and movies have to offer - making Huey ashamed to be kin to him. Huey was outraged about the stolen groceries and refused to eat them.
But it is Huey who gets the column in all the trouble with readers. On September 14th, for example, Huey read off a list of bad film titles that he hated because of their trashiness. Huey simply believes these trashy movies are part of some kind of conspiracy to poison black kids' minds. These titles were "Set it Off," "Booty Call," and "Double Take." The paper got nearly 300 letters of complaint. So, next day, the rest of Huey's list was filled with editorial explanation of why the list was unfit for the comics community.
As far as readers know, there were no letters of complaint about the issue of Riley stealing the old lady's groceries. Why is a popular culture-addicted black kid allowed to be shown stealing groceries, but his intellectual brother punished for speculating on serious topics?
In his first day of exile from the Peanuts community, Huey muses on how the country has changed. He's going to remain his old-school cynical self, he says, that he was a month ago. Next day, still in exile, he is writing a letter to Congresswoman Lee congratulating her on the being the sole vote against what he brashly calls "Bush's warmongering."
Granted, this is pretty rough talk, even from Huey. But he's a kid. I asked my upper-level college students to write their feelings about the attack and the impending war, and a few of them, maybe ten percent, expressed hope that war would not come. Their language was less extreme. and they expressed no quarrel with President Bush's actions. But, again, Huey is very alienated. No one in his family or neighborhood agrees with him. I don't agree with him. Because a comics character has no civil rights, he can be exiled for expressing an unpopular opinion. What does this say to the children?
Tom Dodge is the author of "Tom Dodge Talks About Texas"