Aaron McGruder

Aaron McGruder
Aaron McGruder, at the 2002 Hackers on Planet Earth hacker con
Born	(1974-05-29) May 29, 1974 (age 42) Chicago, Illinois, US
Occupation	Writer, cartoonist, public speaker
Genre	Comic strips, television screenwriter
Notable works	The Boondocks

Aaron Vincent McGruder (born May 29, 1974) is an American writer, lecturer, producer, screenwriter and cartoonist best known for writing and drawing The Boondocks, a Universal Press Syndicate comic strip and its animated TV series adaptation The Boondocks for which he was the creator, executive producer, and head writer.

Aaron McGruder was born in Chicago, Illinois. When Aaron was six years old, his family moved to Columbia, Maryland, after his father accepted a job with the National Transportation Safety Board. McGruder has an older brother.

MacGruder attended a Jesuit school from grades seven to nine, followed by public high school at Oakland Mills High School and the University of Maryland, from which he graduated with a degree in African American Studies.

The Boondocks began as a comic strip on Hitlist.com, one of the first online music websites. At the time, he was also a DJ on The Soul Controllers Mix Show on WMUC.

The comic strip's main characters are two young African-American brothers, Huey (named after Huey P. Newton) and his younger brother and wannabe gangsta, Riley, from inner-city Chicago who are relocated to live with their grandfather in a sedate suburb. In six months, the comic strip was being distributed to more than 200 publications. Five The Boondocks collections have been published: All The Rage, Public Enemy #2, A Right To Be Hostile, Fresh for '01: You Suckaz, and Boondocks: Because I Know You Don't Read The Newspaper. An animated television series adaptation of the strip proved successful on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.