AfroComicCon Brings ‘The Boondocks’ to Oakland

Heroes, villains and the creators of diverse characters will be taking over Oakland’s City Hall this Sunday, Sept. 17 for the 7th annual AfroComicCon celebration, this year in partnership with Art & Soul Oakland. The event centers the work of Black and brown independent creators, and encourages comic book and cartoon fans to experiment with different forms of animation through guest panels, workshops, costume contests, virtual reality demonstrations and more.

Among the most highly anticipated panels this year is one about The Boondocks, the acclaimed animated TV series that ran from 2005 to 2014 on Adult Swim. (It was based on a comic strip  by Aaron MacGruder that appeared in newspapers from 1996 to 2006.) The panel will include Gary Anthony Williams, who voiced the The Boondocks’ popular character Uncle Ruckus — and whose resume spans TV shows, films and video games that include Malcolm in the Middle, Whose Line is it Anyway? and Undercover Brother.

Williams will be joined by screenwriter and producer Rodney Barnes, who worked on all four seasons of The Boondocks, and other TV shows and comic books including Everybody Hates Chris, My Wife and Kids, and Image Comics’ Killadelphia. Ahead of the event, Williams and Barnes shared insight on The Boondocks, their writing process and advice for new actors.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

KQED Arts: Your character Uncle Ruckus on The Boondocks had such an impact — especially for being a minor character on the show. How did you come up with the character’s voice? 

Gary Anthony Williams: Aaron MacGruder wrote an amazing character. In fact, he wasn’t initially in the comics — [which I know] because I had all the comic books before I ever auditioned. I was a The Boondocks freak, man. I read it every Sunday in the paper. [MacGruder] put Ruckus in the comic strip after the TV show took off.

My agent called and said, ‘Hey, there’s this cartoon called The Boondocks, and they’re going to they’re going to do a TV show.’ And I was like, I know it well. I have every book. I want to audition for everybody. So I auditioned for the boys, Huey and Riley. I auditioned for Granddad. I auditioned for Tom, who lived next door. And then they were like, ‘Here’s Uncle Ruckus, a new guy that we’re adding. He’s not in the comic strips, take a look at him.’

What was that audition like, without a comic strip character to base him off of?

Gary Anthony Williams: So they give me his lines and I see what he looks like physically. And then they describe who he is — and it was definitely a character I knew well from growing up in the Deep South. So I immediately I just go back to my Southern upbringing with my dad and some of his friends when I was really young. Just these Black dudes who for some reason seemed not to really care that much about other Black people, right? And they were always espousing the greatness of the white man. Like, there was one dude who would say stuff like, “If you befriend the white man, you shall become friends.” So I took that attitude and then just a lot of slow, stubborn voices from people that I had heard ringing around in my head. And that was Uncle Ruckus, man.

When I started reading that role in the room, I remember Aaron sitting up straight and looking at me. And that was one of those rare times in this business when I left the room going, “I’m pretty sure I got that job.”

Content warning: This video contains language some may find offensive.

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Rodney, you worked on all four seasons of The Boondocks as an executive producer and head writer, while also working on other non-animated shows. What was that like?

Rodney Barnes: Oh, it was a great experience overall. At the time I was working on My Wife and Kids and Everybody Hates Chris by day, and at night, I was working on The Boondocks. Those other two shows were network shows, and they sort of had boundaries, things you couldn’t say. But on The Boondocks, we could say almost anything we wanted, and that was a liberating experience.

Outside of drawing from the comic strip, how did you build The Boondocks out to a full 30-minute show?

Rodney Barnes: Like any TV show, we sit down and come up with ideas that we think sort of have legs that can sustain a story for 30 minutes, things that we thought would be important to the culture, that the culture would be interested in. Things that connected with the period that we were in, but also could extend out into being evergreen. Like any storytelling, it’s more or less sitting down talking about what you think would be interesting.

Gary, what advice would you give others who want to break into voice acting, or the entertainment industry as a whole?

Gary Anthony Williams: I think the best ad in the world was Nike’s “Just do it” — because that is what I believe. I came into this business in a weird way. In high school, I got into acting because of a computer error that put me in an acting class, and then I was like, “Whatever, I’ll do it and I’ll get myself kicked out of it.” And then I was like, “Wait a minute, this is fun.” And then at some point it was, “OK, that’s fun, but can I really do anything with it?”

But the more I kept doing it, the more I enjoyed it — just the pure joy of it. So, No. 1, don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do anything. No. 2, whatever study means to you, do that. And that means different things to different people. I think some of my greatest earliest acting teachers were Bugs Bunny cartoons. I love Bugs, and I love how he could just pop into any disguise, costume, voice personality, change his body, and now he’s somebody different. That was studying for me.

AfroComicCon takes place from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 17  inside Oakland City Hall as well as outside in Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. Tickets and more info here. For more info on Art & Soul, whose lineup this year includes Latyryx, a women in hip-hop revue and more, click here.