The Occasionally Fabulous Cartooning Life of Eric Orner, part 2: Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank

by Mike Rhode

Last month, I posted the beginning of an interview with Eric Orner in which we talked about his career prior to 2022. The second part of the interview is about his new graphic biography Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank. It's one of my favorite books of this year, and I recommend it to you. As you see in this interview, Eric's thought deeply about his craft, and telling Frank's story, and produced a lively biography that's well-worth reading even if you're not particularly interested in politics or gay rights.

MR: Let's talk about Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank.

EO: Glad you pronounced Smahtguy right. It's just a Boston accent. Some people get all tangled up with it. They say “Schhhmartguy” injecting all this weird Yiddish sounding ‘schhhh’ y’know? I tell them “just think of the TV shows Cheers, or Mark Whalberg: “pahk your cah in Hahvahd yahd.” Don’t enunciate the “rs”…

MR: My first basic question is, how did the new book come about? It's a biography of Barney Frank, who eventually became identified as a gay Congressman from Massachusetts. When I saw you speak in D.C., you went into two parts of his life. There was the Congressman part and then there was the closeted gay man who's outed part. I think you gave about equal weight to both of them. So how did this come about? You'd worked for Representative Frank. He retired, so presumably you lost that job again.

EO:  It came about in a pretty matter of fact way, but then there's also sort of the question of “why is this a book?”

MR: Yes, there's that question too, and also “how did you guys sell it?”

EO:  I juggled my cartooning life with a full-time job as a staff counsel, and later as a press secretary on Capitol Hill, working for the committee Barney chaired, House Financial Services. After Barney retired, I stayed on the hill for a while, worked as a speech writer for Maxine Waters, but eventually I had left Washington. Barney remained my friend and at some point about four years ago, he mentioned to me his ambivalence about what had been written about him and frankly, I think even what he had written about himself.  In autobiography, you feel constrained by your relationships with people you care about. There's that constraint and the standard biography of him is sort of a legislative history, and not necessarily multifaceted in terms a person's struggle.

He asked me if writing his biography was something I would be interested in?  My first thought was “not really.”  Political work is my Plan B—like working as a housepainter because your brother-in-law happens to own a painting business, and you need the cash.  I’m first and foremost a cartoonist. And the marriage of cartooning with my Plan B—this workaday life I led during the week as a lawyer and political aide on Capitol Hill—wasn’t something I was dying to do. Also, I'm not a biographer—again, I’m a cartoonist—known for strips about a gay guy’s social life! I have never had any ambition to be Robert Caro or Ron Chernow. Still, it occurred to me that I could certainly draw Barney’s bio. And if I drew it, I could express a great many things that I had encountered, and experienced and felt during a long association with him, marked by a lot of parallels:  My family's from Massachusetts. Because of him, I ended up working in Washington. I'm gay, I'm Jewish. So, at the outset, I'm pretty well positioned to talk about this person's life and times. But then the question is, “Why would I want to do that?” Just because I worked for him? Or admire him? Those reasons weren’t persuasive.  The last thing in the world I wanted to do was create a hagiographic biography—or even an authorized biography of Barney. I had no interest in that sort of sanitized version of storytelling . If you read my Ethan stuff, you’ll know I'm opinionated, I want the right to shoot my mouth off.

 But, I am fascinated by politics and American political history. I’d hoped to be a newspaper editorial cartoonist as a kid, and started out that way after college, before newspapers across the country went broke or belly up.  Also: I do think that every once in a while, there are political leaders that come up through Congress that have a cultural import on American society. I think Barney is one of them. Bella Abzug is another example: the personification of American feminism. John Lewis , another, the personification of the American civil rights movement in Congress.  Jeanette Rankin, represents a strain of nonalignment that runs through our politics.  She got elected Congress twice, for single terms separated by 20 years. In her first term she voted against American involvement in the first World War. And then she finally gets back to Congress, 20 years later from Montana of all places, and she votes against the second World War. Each in their own way represents the advance of American democracy, which in the history of the planet is pretty unique. Even if, sure, it’s flawed, like Winston Churchill noted, it's the worst system, except for all the other systems”.

To tell a life story of an important participant in all that, struck me as worth telling. When I brought the idea to Macmillan/Henry Holt Books, I think they were attracted to it because Barney was the first voluntarily out gay members of Congress, and not the kid of someone famous. His rise wasn’t because he was good looking or charming. There’s an anti-hero aspect of him and I thought that makes it a good story. Flaws make it interesting. Try writing about someone who's not flawed; you're bored after the third page.

MR: You mentioned John Lewis. Did you look at The March trilogy, three graphic novels done about his life done with his cooperation? And did you take any lessons from it?

EO:  I'm holding it in my hand, but I admit to you, I haven't read it. And I didn't read it because that goes back to the very first thing we talked about, where my roots were in cartooning. It strikes me more as a non-ironic story, as in some of those old DC comics of Superman, where good and evil are typified. I'm not knocking it. It's like the difference between a John Wayne movie and a Jerry Seinfeld TV show. It's a different kind of storytelling and not, I admit, one that’s for me. I'm looking at it right now and it's obviously a beautiful work. I have total admiration for the achievement, but it doesn’t have the wise-ass posture—think Bechdel, or Crumb or Lynda Barry –that keeps me engaged.

One thing that has worried me all along in this project is that yes. I have a longstanding relationship, friendship, and respect for Barney, but no, he was not involved in creating Smahtguy. He had no right of refusal. He wasn't looking at pages and saying, “No none of that,” and I'm a little bit sensitive that people might think that.

MR: So this was a totally independent artwork by you after the idea came up between the two of you. That's good to know, because March is certainly a community effort between the three of them. That's good to get that one settled. Let's go back to your work. How did you do it? I believe you used traditional pen and ink, at least for the drawing, right?

EO: My artistic process has been… muddled is probably the best word because of my decade-long experience in animation. It's still pen and ink -based. Here's the process. My goal is to not have tightness until I absolutely have no choice. I storyboard everything on real loose, crappy post-it notes. Then it's a question of capturing that action. It's worked out on a post-it note and a post-it note is such a terrible surface that it prevents you from getting too precious. But if you try five times to get the expression you want, it's just little marks on a paper, but you captured it. Then I pull those post-it notes into the computer, and I blow them up to a larger size. And then I try sketching over them because I really do work out the gestures and the expressions on those notes. It's a very strange process.

MR: When you say you're trying to draw over them, I missed if that was on the computer, or do you print them back out again larger to draw on?

EO:  No, I print them out. A lot of my friends say, “Why do you do that? At this point? You can just take a stylus and draw on a tablet.” Maybe I'll get to that point. I'm never going to get to the point where I where I do the initial drawings in the computer, I think there's too much temptation to then clean them up because you have the tools to do so. Can't clean on much on a post-It note. It looks crappy to begin with, and the point is to not to make it too clean, too fast.

MR: There is one cartoonist to publish a book of his drawings on post-it notes, drawn with highlighters. Frank Santoro's Pittsburgh.

EO:  What I like about the digital side of the process, which comes next is, I can blow up or reduce drawings, or part of drawings. And I can layer them just like animation so I can reuse backgrounds and have figures as if they were on a cel and move across those backgrounds. Also, I can achieve a sort of vibrancy colorwise that is important to me. But my digital skillset isn't sufficient to allow me to capture gesture and movement and expression, unless I'm starting out with my hand.

MR: Do you end up with a standard page at some point?

EO:  In the end, I build this whole thing using these different iterations of each panel from post-it note to a drawing, that's assembled with different pieces of drawn material. That's scanned and, I end up assembling a completed page. That is a digital collage, basically all these different post-It notes and scraps of paper, and only then, I print out this messy-looking collage that I can put on a light table. Even though it's messy looking, it has all the information I want. All the drawing is there; they just weren't all done at the same time or with the same tools. Again, it's a collage I print out and I put it on a light table, and I ink it then. I want a variation of thickness and line; I want movement in the line itself. I don't quite know how to create that with a stylus and a tablet. I'm sure it's doable and I see tools all the time that I think about buying, but in the end, I do ink it using brush pens.

MR: That makes perfect sense. But the color is done on Photoshop, right?

EO:  Yeah. I might scan different fabrics or surfaces for textures. And then I add color visually, but I lower the transparency, so in some places it’s a combination I get to achieve the colors. I want a combination of digital color, but also some sort of original paper with some texture.

MR: About the colors in the book, you used a pretty basic palette and it's all flat color for the most part. Does the color have any significance, like if it's blue, is it a specific type of scene, or if it's tan, is it a different one or is it more just aesthetics?

EO:  I might push back on your basic color statement, as the whole creative scheme for the book was a limited palette. I’m not interested in having a multicolored page. There are instances I would cheat because I have this certain color scheme, these three colors that I think accurately represent the mood of this scene, but the scene might shift. I'm looking on page 102 and the scene shifts from a long extended period in Boston to a discussion of the Vatican.  And for the Vatican, I wanted to use that Vatican yellow that you see on their flags. So sometimes I cheat, but it was important to me, for mood, to select a very limited palette for the major landscapes of the book. Boston, DC, and stick to them. That's mostly just because I think it looks cool, and it allowed me to like set the mood in a way that I thought it'd be less successful if I used multicolor.

MR: Is there a split between Boston being one color and DC being a different color?

EO:  I think when you're drawing a graphic novel or a cartoon, it's sort of like you're trying to show the reader the imagined landscape, you see in your head. Boston in my mind is very rich with large variation of reds; Think of the way the sun hits a Boston sidewalk, a brick sidewalk at 4PM in June. And then the very different red, think the red of a brick school on a dreary day in November. The Boston sections are heavy on red, and the DC sections are heavy on different versions of ivory. My goal is to use color, as a painter, not just because I can, or because it’s the correct color assigned to a certain thing: A frog, painted green, for example. But to evoke a mood.

MR: You don't want the color to draw a reader away from the story.

EO:  Right, and I do think it's easy to have that happen. If it supports the mood, that's good, but I don't want people dropping out of the story.

MR: Do you make any of your income by selling original art?

 

EO:  Sure, I sell original art. I’d draw every day, even if I didn’t get paid it. It's how I live. It's a practice, like the way other people do yoga. I go out with a sketch pad and one of the great joys of my life is just to go out and sketch. I've done it everywhere I lived, and I don't take pictures on vacation. I make drawings. And it's those drawings that I make specifically just to entertain myself, that I post on Facebook. There's always one over that banner that you have on Facebook at the top, which I change out about once a week, depending on how I'm drawing. Those are the drawings that I sell more of. People reach out to me and say “I want that drawing of Main street in Santa Monica,” or of “that sexy guy standing outside a bus station in Utica” or whatever. I travel a lot. I have an opportunity to sketch a lot and that brings me a lot of joy. Sometimes people call for Ethan originals, but they all want the same handful of 15 or 20 episodes that the originals are gone, and I offer to make them prints, which, people feel differently about.

MR: How do people actually contact you if they want to buy, because I am not finding a website for you?

EO: I had a website for years, but right now I think the easiest thing to do is to go through my author page on McMillan. The best way is to contact me is through my publisher, or via social media.

MR: You should give or sell art from this book to the Library of Congress. It would fit right into their comic art collection.

EO:  Well, I love the LOC.  In my career as a congressional staffer, there were times I would just have a big lunch and I would just need five minutes to shut my eyes. But there's no place to do that in Rayburn. I would take a tunnel down underneath the capital over to the Library and find some place in the stacks to sit on a stool and shut my eyes.  It's one of my favorite memories about DC. I like the cafeteria too, which is a way of getting away from the hill for a minute even though you hadn't really left.

MR: What was the time period when you were in Washington?

EO:  2008 through 2012. There was also a brief stint during the Gingrich speakership in ‘94-95. I lived in Adams Morgan.

MR: Do you have anybody you'd like to list as your influences?

EO:  People I very much look up to in a cartooning world are Lynda Barry, Mimi Pond, Ed Sorel, Robert Goodman, RO Blechman, the Pushpin people, but also Mad magazine writers and artists Harvey Kurtzman, Sergio Aragones, Jack Davis. And Alison Bechdel. She and I just did this wonderful thing together for Smahtguy with the Society of Illustrators in New York.

MR: I have one other name to ask you about. You mentioned Gay Comix, and I was wondering if Howard Cruse had influenced you at all?

Cartoon that broke Orner's Twitter account

EO:  I have great respect for Howard Cruse, but it gets back to that sensibility thing. You like what you like. Howard’s work has a lot of integrity and a lot of sweetness. I'm a lot more Jules Feiffer than I am Howard Cruse. Yes, we're both gay men writing comics. but that's basically where the similarity ends. Once we did a piece on that for The Advocate where we just made fun of the fact that we didn't do similar work.

MR: His name was out there early in the field, so if you were going to see a gay out cartoonist, it was probably going to be Howard Cruse.

EO:  Yeah, if you're talking about 1989, not if you're talking 1995. I ran in The Advocate then.

MR: I was talking more like 1976.

EO:  Yeah, definitely then. Absolutely. Even when I was in The Advocate, there are permutations to everything, and there are in the gay press too. The Advocate was out of Los Angeles, and it had a different sensibility than Out Magazine or Out Week or, or these much more politically agitated publications. I was very young during AIDS, so there was an immediacy and urgency and anger, and to me, all those things usually blend into humor. Part of the way I get angry about something is to be funny about it. There’s a difference between an east coast and a west coast sensibility in comics. You would think San Francisco was more aligned with east coast (at least politically), but in terms of comics, it’s west coast and the vibe was different.

MR: If you could, what in your career would you do over or change?

EO:  I would've insisted on much more editorial control over the Ethan movie. I would've pursued television animation rather than feature animation in Los Angeles, and animation with an editorial bent that mirrored my own sensibilities. I decided to try and make a living as an artist, and so I segued into animation and was busy when maybe I could have done an Ethan Green graphic novel. But to me, Ethan Green graphic novel wouldn't be a lot different than sitting down with the four Ethan Green books from St. Martin's Press because they're all on-running stories. They're not like comic strips, with here's the episode, here's the punchline, move on to the next episode.

MR: What work do you think you are best known for? It's probably Ethan Green. But do you think it's going to be Smahtguy?

EO: Well, I guess it's too early to tell. I draw every day, whether somebody's interested in looking at it or paying me for it or not. So, I think of myself as maybe mid-career and I hope there's a lot more books in me. Ethan was around a long time and my name is associated with it. Smahtguy came out five weeks ago [on May 3, 2022] and it's getting good reviews. It got a nice review from NPR, so we'll see.

MR: What would you like to do in the future or work on in the future? Do you want to do more works like this? Do you want to do a travelogue? European comics have a lot of people that just do travelogues.

EO:  Because of animation, I lived in Tel Aviv, and then in Sydney for the better part of a decade. My boss from Disney got hired to create a studio in Jerusalem and he took a bunch of Disney artists with him. I lived there for almost three years and did a lot of comics about that experience, but I'm working on something now that's an expansion of a short story that I did called Porno. It was printed in a compilation that Robert Kirby edited called QU33R and it came out 10 years ago from Northwest Press. My story is the first story in the book, and it's about a murder that happened in Chicago that I had a very peripheral involvement with, and I would like to draw that story, book length. That's what I'm working on now and, I admit in my heart of hearts, I think that that would make a good film. Maybe animated or maybe just live action. A guy can dream.

My editor at Holt, she also edits Riad Sattouf, this important cartoonist out of Paris who's Syrian and is doing The Arab of the Future. I've been reading those. She’s also Joe Sacco’s editor, and stuff with an international bent always interests me. I'm very interested in the politics of anywhere. I went to Tufts which had a special school of diplomacy. if you're talking about foreign politics, I'm interested whether it's Persepolis, or Pyongyang or The Arab of the Future or Rutu Modan’s books about Israel, I get into all of that. I always recommend Persepolis.

MR: It's interesting that she walked away from the field for the most part after that and went into movie making.

EO:  In a way this doesn't surprise me because I think graphic noveling is a little like movie making. I always start out with a tight script, and I tell other people to do that. I can't imagine wasting drawing time. It's like wasting film or screen time when you’re paying for these actors. You have to start out with a screenplay and then essentially you are not filming it, you're drawing it. But it works the same way. You have to understand where your locations are. You have to understand where the camera is, unless you're just coming up with something very flat. Sometimes I look at some books that are just pages of talking heads and I'm just like, “Well…”

MR: I saw Tilly Walden recently, who used to do autobiographical comics, but now she just did a Walking Dead spin off, based on a video game. And she said she just sits down and just draws a whole chapter and gives it to her editor who then tells her, “This makes no sense,” or whatever. Then she draws it again, and sometimes she just keeps redrawing it and she said something like “Yeah, it's a lot of work, but you get better every time you redraw the same scenes.”

EO: That makes some sense to me, but I do think that it's a division in this field between people who really just want to draw. I really just want to tell a story, and the drawing is the medium for doing it. And I do love to draw, but I think if you're drawing without a tight story, you fall into this place like Tim Burton’s movies where it's amazing looking, but the storytelling's a mess.

MR: What's your favorite thing about DC?

EO:  I have a real specific and weird answer to this and it's alluded to in Smahtguy. It is something so quiet and weird. I run a lot, and DC’s often very hot and stinky. Something I loved about DC was when you descend it down into Rock Creek Park from the street level and you take a path down and suddenly, you’re looking up at those giant bridges and you get this sort of miraculous relief because the temperature has dropped 15 degrees. That's my favorite thing about DC.

MR: The counterpoint to that was, what was your least favorite?

EO:  I found that DC was not super appreciative of a policy person or a Capitol Hill aide who had artistic interests. There's a feeling there, “Well, then that's not a serious person.” It's very focused. I've lived in places that are more supportive of having a creative life on the side. There's a big split in Smahtguy between Boston, which is funny. Boston's funny at the outset. Cheers was funny, Marky Mark was funny, the Red Sox are funny. DC’s not funny. This makes me sound like I'm knocking DC. DC's also a lot of things that I admire enormously. I was talking about them earlier, like the miracle of democracy. But it’s got a heavy load to shoulder, and that responsibility prevents it from being a particularly lighthearted place. It's not really fair to the real city because I always thought you're talking about two different things. Are you talking about the District and everything that it represents, it’s African-American roots and Chocolate City vibe? It's jazziness, it's sophistication? That’s the District versus Washington, which is very forbidding and not particularly lighthearted concept.

MR: What monument or museum did you prefer to take a visitor to, or like to go to yourself?  

EO: Here is my answer as a good Bostonian. My answer to this is the absence of the monument that I think should be there. There should be a monument to the Adamses. The idea that this city lacks a monument to a founding fathers who was against slavery, was appalled by it, doesn’t make sense.  There should be a monument to Abigail, John and John Quincy. And when you put it up, I'll be happy to say that's my favorite. It actually drives me crazy. I thought [it might happen] when David McCullough’s book came out generation ago.  Even in Boston itself, the Adams historical site is in Quincy. It's 20 miles from Boston and it’s modest as they were because they were Yankee Protestants who weren't interested in showoffy self-importance. But their ideals… when you read things that Abigail and he were writing to each other, you think “These are the Americans we should admire.” I also like the Duke Ellington bridge.

MR: Finally, how did the COVID-19 outbreak affect you personally or professionally?

EO: COVID happened in the time where I was halfway through the book, so professionally it didn't affect me much at all. It's just the rest of the world was suddenly doing what I had to do, which was stay in and sit on my deck. It was really odd because suddenly my neighborhood became very populated. I was two years into what had been a four-year project, so it was odd in that sense.