The funnies, in black and white: The New Yorker takes a look at often-controversial cartoonist Aaron McGruder and his "popular and subversive" comic strip The Boondocks:

"McGruder doesn’t read the funnies, and he doesn’t like the people who draw them. Growing up, he was a Peanuts fan, like everyone else, and he counts Doonesbury and Bloom County, featuring Opus, the iconic political penguin, as influences. But mostly he sees the comics page, with all its benign Dennis the Menaces and Heathcliffs and Blondies, as the domain of 'seventy-year-old white men,' some of whom — like Bil Keane, the author of the vaguely Christian Family Circus, and Mort Walker, of Beetle Bailey —he freely admits to not respecting.

"'I don’t go to the cartoonist conventions,' McGruder said. 'I went once, to the Reuben Awards' — the Oscars of cartooning — 'and I didn’t feel very welcome. I felt a palpable sense of resentment. Bil Keane was the m.c., and he opened doing more than one joke that was clearly aimed at me. It was raw — just some fucked-up shit. O.K., and yet, if I get out of my chair right now and beat the shit out of you, then I’m the bad guy? You’re sitting here, clearly dogging me — not by name, but how many black cartoonists are working? He told some joke about diversity in comics. Like "There’s a lot of diversity in comics these days. They don’t have to be funny, they just have to be diverse." There were a couple of shots at me where I was like, "Motherfucker, you don’t know me. We’re not cool".'"