The Boondocks was syndicated to over 300 clients at its peak, but more than half substituted different features rather than publish reruns during the hiatus. Repeats of earlier strips were offered by Universal Press Syndicate in the interim. On February 28, 2006, McGruder announced that his strip would go on a six-month hiatus, starting March 27, 2006, with new installments resuming in October. I still care what it looks like, and I always will.' To this day there has never been a single Boondocks strip that I did not personally touch - I still obsess over the details of Huey, Riley, Caesar and Granddad. People think I stopped drawing the strip, but that's never been the case. In the introduction to the collection Public Enemy #2, McGruder wrote, 'I had hired an artist to help me on some of the art duties. I think I'm a better writer than artist.' Carl Jones succeeded Seng as illustrator in late 2004. In an interview with The New Yorker, McGruder said, 'If something had to give, it was going to be the art. In Fall 2003, Boston-based artist Jennifer Seng assumed art duties from McGruder. No strips printed before 1999 are known to have been archived nor survived.Īs it gained popularity, the comic strip was picked up by the Universal Press Syndicate and made its national debut on April 19, 1999. It later appeared in the monthly hip hop magazine The Source in 1997. (Upon the revelation in 2004 of news article fabrications by Blair, by then a reporter for The New York Times, McGruder's comic strip joined others in lampooning Blair.) He pulled the strip after the paper refused to run an apology. McGruder ended the strip's run in The Diamondback on March 18, 1997, two weeks after the strip was omitted due to a technical error and a Diamondback staffer printed the word 'OOPS' in its place without an explanation. It later appeared in The Diamondback under editor Jayson Blair on December 3, 1996, paying McGruder $30 per strip - $17 more than other cartoonists.

The strip debuted in Februon, an early online music website. Publication history Early history (1996-1998)

The Boondocks by Aaron McGruder