Dave Mays, the co-founder of The Source Magazine, is claiming a significant piece of cultural history: that he was the person who brought Aaron McGruder’s comic strip The Boondocks to a national audience, years before it became a celebrated animated series.
Mays says the discovery happened almost by accident. Growing up in DC, he was visiting his mother, who worked at the University of Maryland, when he came across the school’s college newspaper.
McGruder’s strip was inside it. “I’m looking through it, there’s a Boondocks cartoon in there,” Mays recalled. “I’m like, ‘Oh, this is dope.'”
From there, he moved quickly. “I got in touch with him and put him in the Source Magazine,” he said. “That’s how The Boondocks went national.”
According to Mays, the strip ran in The Source not as a back-page novelty but in a more prominent position. When others assumed it had been tucked away at the rear of the magazine, he was firm in his correction.
“It was in the front section,” he said. He added that the strip appeared in the magazine for a couple of years, giving McGruder’s work consistent national exposure through one of hip-hop’s most widely read publications at the time.
The claim reframes the origin story of one of the most culturally significant Black comic strips in American history.
The Boondocks, which follows the Freeman family after they relocate from Chicago to a predominantly white suburb, eventually became a long-running animated television series known for its sharp political and social commentary.
But Mays is pointing to a chapter that predates all of that, one rooted in a college newspaper and a chance encounter during a holiday visit home.
Mays also gave a specific shoutout to a character from the strip’s early run who never made the transition to the animated version. “Shoutout to Caesar, the character in The Boondocks with the dreadlocks who never made it to the cartoon, but he was from Brooklyn,” he said.
The detail about Caesar adds texture to Mays’s account, suggesting a familiarity with the strip’s early material that goes beyond a passing association.
It also points to how much the property evolved between its print origins and its television incarnation, with certain characters and elements left behind along the way.
Whether or not The Source’s role in platforming The Boondocks has been widely documented, Mays is clearly intent on making sure it is not forgotten.
For a magazine that spent decades at the center of hip-hop culture, the idea that it also served as a launchpad for one of Black America’s most enduring satirical voices adds another layer to its legacy.
