Eric Orner has been a professional cartoonist for decades, and worked his way through many types of cartooning. Early in the summer of 2022, as COVID restrictions started lifting, he read from his new book Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank at Solid State Books, to an audience that included many of his former colleagues from Frank's Congressional office. It's one of my favorite graphic books of 2022, which I was not expecting when I casually decided to go see the author of the Ethan Green comic strip that used to run in a newspaper in DC.
What are the odds that a disheveled, zaftig, closeted kid with the
thickest of Jersey accents might wind up running Boston on behalf of a
storied Irish Catholic political machine, drafting the nation’s first
gay rights laws, reforming Wall Street after the Great Recession, and
finding love, after a lifetime assuming that he couldn't and wouldn’t?In Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank, one of
America’s first out members of Congress and a gay and civil rights
crusader for an era is confirmed as a hero of our age. But more than a
biography of an indispensable LGBTQ pioneer, this funny, beautifully
rendered, warts-and-all graphic account reveals the down-and-dirty inner
workings of Boston and DC politics. As Frank’s longtime staff
counsel and press secretary, Eric Orner lends his first-hand perspective
to this extraordinary work of history, paying tribute to the mighty
striving of committed liberals to defend ordinary Americans from an
assault on their shared society. (from the publisher's description)
MR: What type of comic work or cartooning do you do? I know you've done at least two and maybe three different times of cartooning in your career.
EO: I’m a comic strip artist, who also does graphic novels, animation, and illustration. My artistic roots are really with the alternative weekly newspaper cartooning that existed and really proliferated when I was a kid in seventies and eighties and lasted into the nineties. Cartoonists like Jules Feiffer, Linda Berry, Mimi Pond. Opinionated, funny, subversive cartooning that often appeared in weekly newspapers inspired me to crate my own cartoons. My art may have developed over the years, but that sensibility hasn’t. Whether it's animation or drawing a graphic novel, there's a through line in terms of sensibility; My work is always going to be little subversive, political and, hopefully, funny.
MR: Your major comic strip was The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green, which used to run in the Washington Blade. Can you talk a little bit about that? How you started it, how long it ran, how many papers you got it in?
EO: Ethan Green published in about 100 newspapers. about 75% of them, were LGBTQ newspapers. The rest were Alt Weeklies—opinionated weekly newspapers, mostly in college towns and the occasional big city paper, like the Boston Phoenix.
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| The Ethan Green family of characters |
The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green was collected in four books from St. Martin's Press, and an omnibus from Northwest Press. In 2005, the strip was adapted as an indie feature film, (also titled The MostlyUnfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green) that got a decent—17 city—release at the time.
MR: So obviously it was a strip about Ethan Green, but can you give our younger readers a little bit of background about it?
EO: When I was coming out in my mid-twenties, there was no comic strip—and not that much storytelling in popular media period about “average” gay folks and their social lives. What gay storytelling in comics there was seemed over the top and stereotypical to me: oversexed Tom of Finland, hyper-sexualized depictions, or fey, campy queens such as Liberace or Uncle Arthur on Bewitched. There were comic books. There was a series called Gay Comix and then another one called Meatmen, and those were the two. That's what we saw about gay men in comics; . I thought it was reductive. I wanted to write something that was funny but accessible. I wanted it to be about an average gay guy.
About a guy that looked like he had a job, and friends he went out with, and a next door neighbor (played by Shanola Hampton in the Ethan movie, by the way) who’s couch you wouldn’t mind taking refuge on, after some jerk dumped you. I wanted readers to recognize themselves in Ethan Green, and to enjoy an intimacy akin to a friend telling you over coffee all dreadful things that he or she was experienced in dating, in going to clubs, in hooking up, in experiencing all the painful, but funny, misfires of a person's social life.
There were models for that in the straight comics world, like the comic strips, Cathy, or Sylvia, Nicole Hollander’s feminist strip about being a divorced woman. And on TV: almost every episode of Mary Tyler Moore, or Frasier, or Seinfeld. Some love interest who for whatever reason, was fatally flawed in a pretty funny way. But despite the romantic failures, the lives of these characters were full. That was a formula for Ethan.
All through college, I did political cartoons for the Boston Globe and Boston Phoenix. Even sports cartoons for the Boston Herald. After graduating I landed a full-time job with the daily newspaper in Concord New Hampshire, the Concord Monitor—an association I remain really proud of. I met some of the country’s best future journalists working at the farm team that was the Monitor. As much as I loved the paper though, and doing a daily editorial cartoon, being a gay guy in New Hampshire during the AIDS crisis wasn’t safe or welcoming... So I quit, and I moved to Boston. As a consolation prize, I drew what I was seeing –and hearing—mostly at gay bars—while I was out there trying to make friends and, and find romance. These cartoons were just little things that I drew to amuse myself. At some point though, I showed them to an editor of Bay Windows, an LGBTQ weekly in Boston and he bought them all. Soon these cartoons were picked up by other gay press outlets across the country.
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| A Boston Herald cartoon featuring a sleazy 1980s version of Donald Trump, who had just purchased the USFL |
MR: Returning to the movie, 99% of
these types of movies that get optioned never get made, but yours got made. Did
you have anything you wanted to say about the process?
EO: I didn't know anything about movies, when I was
contacted by this couple of young filmmakers, but I was impressed that they’d
worked on Men in Black, so I agreed to meet with them and one thing led to
another. Later I moved to Hollywood, worked in animation and learned more about
the film business but this happened just before that. Bottom line is, I'm very proud
that The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green movie got made, because
like you say, most stories that get optioned then just sit on a shelf, “in
development” forever. So, I’m pretty grateful for having had the experience
being at a movie premier where my own characters were up there on the big
screen, especially with Meredith Baxter playing Ethan's mom. However, If I ever
have the opportunity again, I know to apply a little bit more rigor in terms of
the screenplay. The movie’s flaw was it attempted to be too true to a comic
strip which ran over 15 years. They threw everything but the kitchen sink into a
plot that wound up sort of all over the place. I was honored by the fact that they attempted
to shoehorn in all these little details from so many Ethan episodes—it’s pretty
seductive to see actual panels you’ve drawn come to life—but
what I should have said to them is, “Look, you should pick one story-line and
stick to it. This strip is 15 years long. There's lots of specific story-lines
and you just need to stick to one strand.” The movie has funny parts, but it was
panned for being sprawling and messy.
MR: The comic strip ran over 15 years. Did you keep working off your life for that entire time, or did he start to just become a more independent type fictional character?
EO: The sensibility was mine, but the main character wasn't really me. He was often single, with a series of boyfriends who never worked out. I had a husband throughout the strip’s 15-year run. sometimes fans of the strip would learn that and feel a little bit misled, because there was an assumption that it was autobiographical. I think a lot of fiction works like this. People make the assumption that you're the main character, but your voice could be coming out of the cat, or the grandmother. There's no law that says, “I have to apply my thoughts to the character that looks most like me. Though admittedly, there were parallels. He was a youngish gay guy with a vaguely Jewish background. He worked for somebody famous. In Ethan’s case a notoriously bad-at-forecasting TV weatherman. I had a day job working for someone famous, a Congressman. Ethan Green published during some of the toughest years of AIDS-HIV -- the darkness before the dawn of the “drug cocktail” that showed up in 1996. A lot of the story-lines were thing I was reporting on and living amidst, if not experiencing personally. Ethan, who was presumably negative because I never identified him as positive, had a positive boyfriend for example, where my husband and I had the same, not differing, HIV status.
Some of the situational gags in Ethan happened to me in real life: Like leaving a bar and going home with someone who, you quickly realized wasn’t actually someone you wanted to spend the rest of the evening with. Stuff like that often strikes me as funny, though also sorta awful, even as it happening in real time This one Ethan episode called “Your Sordid Love Life, Revisited” was based on something that had happened to me years before: I had gone home with some guy who happened to live in Kenmore Square, where Fenway Park is. I left some club with him, got to his apartment and realized that for whatever reason, I wanted out immediately. Boston is a big city, but it shuts down at night. It was three o'clock in the morning, and he was yelling at me out a window as I emerged out onto the street from his building and then went to look for my car. He’s hurling curses—FRIGGIN' PRICK TEASE!—that are bouncing off the pavement. You could’ve heard him in the Berkshires.
MR: That advice, “write what you know,” is not necessarily the greatest advice, but if you're going to do a 15-year-long comic strip, there's definitely going to be some of that necessary.
EO: I agree. though I think that advice applies more fully to my current book, Smahtguy. “Write what you know” depends on what you actually know. I have a lot of friends who are academics and so they write about college English departments. There have been a few good books like that, but being a bus driver, you might learn something more interesting. In terms of storytelling, it was never my choice to have a pretty rigorous day job in politics, but day jobs generate material and creativity, if you have enough energy to write before or after work. Simply being out there at work every day and rubbing elbows with colleagues in a work setting for years on Capitol Hill, has its advantages when it comes experiencing something you later choose to write about.
MR: Let me ask how you came to work for Disney, what you were doing for Disney and any thoughts you might have about animation?
EO: I've had this weird bifurcated professional life where all I ever wanted to be was a cartoonist. But I needed to make a living. Sometimes I was doing pretty well. The early years of Ethan, I was making a good living for a 22-year-old kid. Now I would be like, “Oh God, how am I gonna pay for my life?” But then it was, “Hey, this is pretty good.” I had different stints of working these political jobs. I never wanted to practice law, but if you're going to work political jobs as a policy staffer, having a law degree helps. So I went to law school all while I was drawing Ethan. I juggled two different lives at the same time.
EO: I've always thought my artistic career was one-step forward, maybe three-quarter step back. It was a step forward to get a movie made. It was a three-quarter step back to not more rigorously keep control of the story-line because in the end it was my characters out there with my names and I'm a good storyteller, so I should have. In animation it made sense to learn animation and to be part of that world; it probably didn't make sense to pursue a job at Disney. I should have tried for Adult Swim. I just didn't have an in at Adult Swim. You take the in that you have, and mine was at Disney with a producer who knew my comic strip work. So you try and take these experiences and make something out of them, even if they aren’t the ultimate in terms of what you're looking for.
MR: Well, the fact that you've been able to make artwork for this period of time and at least make a partial living for it puts you above probably 90% of other people who may have thought they wanted to be a cartoonist. And probably you're still doing better than 95% [of those who worked in the field].
I know many incredibly talented artists in animation, but they don't publish and it's like only one in 500 show that are pitched actually get made. So their artistic or creative ambitions are often unrealized, even though they're making good livings and they're working on amazing projects, but there aren't those projects aren't their own. I can live with that, what I gave up. I don't think I would've done it on my own, had the recession not hit and I continued to have to be story boarding out there. I probably would've kept at it, but being able to publish your own stuff leads you to want to continue to create your own stuff. Also there's no reason to feel limited. That said, I'd love to create an animated series—and I do think that show-runners and directors are often less like talented journeymen artists and more like people who create their own work. I might be wrong, but that's having seen it from both sides, that’s where I’ve landed. I just want the chance to continue to tell my own stories and hopefully entertain people with my own stuff.
To be continued with the story of Smahtguy...
