Aaron McGruder on Charlie Rose

I dug up a fourteen minute segment of Charlie Rose in which the titular host talks with Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder about two months after the comic strip's debut. McGruder was on something of a media circuit at the time -- I highlighted a contemporary Washington Journal interview with him several years ago -- and he strikes me as trying to force himself to look more comfortable than he is. As he suggests in the interview, much of this notoriety came at him very suddenly. (I should note, too, that he becomes more visibly comfortable in interviews as the years go on.)

As this is as the very start of McGruder's career and he's basically being introduced to a national audience in under fifteen minutes, the content of the interview is relatively superficial. What I find more interesting is Rose's approach. He clearly has his notes and done a bit of research on McGruder himself, but he also has virtually no context for any of it. He admits to his own ignorance of ANY other Black comic strip creators and tries to conflate the content of Boondocks with that of South Park. There's much more said here about how the media handles (or at least handled in 1999) Black creative people than about McGruder and/or Boondocks.

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