Unfunny Business

Since 1999, Aaron McGruder's comic strip Boondocks, which runs in over 250 newspapers and stars two amusingly surly African-American kids who live with their grandfather in a white middle-class suburb, has taken jokey potshots at everything from white paranoia to Whitney Houston. On Sept. 24, McGruder began a series of strips in response to the Sept. 11 attacks -- including one that tweaked Americans' ''blind, unquestioning faith in our almost-elected leaders.'' One week later, the strip was banished from New York's Daily News, replaced by a Jumbo X-Word puzzle. McGruder, 27, who has won praise for bringing political savvy and African-American sensibilities to a medium not known for either, expected some newspapers to nix his controversial strip. (Besides the Daily News, the only other paper to take action was The Dallas Morning News, which pulled two strips and then moved the comic to another part of the features section.) ''But this isn't some broad argument about the role of comic strips as much as it is about the control of information,'' McGruder contends. ''It's this notion that in a time of crisis we need to be less critical of our leadership that I just think is ass backwards.''