Pioneer gay comic strip hero Ethan Green finally snags a date with the big screen
Reyhan Harmaci (San Francisco Cronicle) - 29 June 2006
In the 15-year life of comic character Ethan Green, L.A. artist Eric Orner has created the perfect vessel to embody the complexities of gay urban life -- although at this point, there is little about "gay urban life" that most Americans wouldn't recognize simply as "adult human life."
Like the Sisyphus of the single world, Ethan dates perpetually. Over and over he hauls his neurosis and anxieties up the hill, only to have them roll back over him. You laugh at his insight and his antics and then put down the comic and try really hard to convince yourself that no matter how many mistakes you and Ethan have both made, you won't end up like him.
After four collections of Orner's strips, which have run in more than a hundred newspapers and alt-weeklies in America and Europe, "The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green" is now a live-action movie, directed by George Bamber, that had its premiere at this year's Frameline (San Francisco's LGBT film festival that concluded Sunday) and opens Friday at the Lumiere. The film, starring Daniel Letterle, David Monahan and "Family Ties" mom Meredith Baxter, went to film festivals around the country before getting picked up for wider release; its run in L.A. and New York City has been extended for three weeks.
In a funny twist, though, neither Ethan's creator nor the film's director is anything close to being single. Orner's been in the same relationship throughout the evolution of Ethan, and Bamber has a 4-year old child with his partner of 11 years.
"Early on, it was an oddity that I was writing about this young guy who was always dating and I had been going out with someone for a while," Orner, 41, says, laughing during a phone interview from Los Angeles. "But maybe over time it went from something that amused me to something that might take me to a therapist.
"But I was single when I got out of college," Orner adds. "Apparently I have a lot to say about that time."
It helps, too, that Ethan has never been a stand-in for Orner himself. While they may share certain traits -- Orner says they are both funny, dorky, irritable and short -- Ethan is a composite of "a thousand stories."
Bamber was actually eating a sushi dinner with his partner (who is also the film's producer) when they hit on the idea of making a movie from Orner's strips.
He rejects the suggestion that being in a relationship stops you from relating to Ethan. "Look, we've all had to date. Whether you're dating the same person for three years or 20 years, it's the same shocking experience.
"There is nothing easy about dating. It's probably like snowboarding: It's thrilling because the chance of wiping out and getting your head bashed is very high.
"Ethan's the only character I've read whose dating life looks worse than my own."
For the film, screenwriter David Vernon boiled down 15 years of Ethan Green into some key elements: his relationship with longtime ex, Leo; his cross-dressing older confidantes, the Hat Sisters; his lesbian roommate Charlotte; and a rebound trick, the irrepressible twink Punch. His employer, pompous weatherman Monty Poole, didn't make it into the movie, although at one point Ethan does take Poole's toupee to the dry cleaners along with his suit. It's a romantic comedy, though; to tell the story in 90 minutes, Ethan's life had to be reduced to the essence of his train-wreck relationships.
But the shock and awe of Ethan's dating life isn't the only reason the comic has flourished for so long. Orner has made Ethan change with the times, riffing on the existence of "Post Post Gays" and snarkily chronicling the adventures of Ethan's best friend, Buck, who has a boyfriend Ethan hates.
Take a strip from 2002, for instance, when Ethan finds himself stranded on the dance floor. He sums up the experience like this: "The dance floor has become uncool. Only the periphery is cool. You can't find Bucky, you can't find Charlotte, you can't even find Jason Chiang, who you're quarreling with, though what better time to make up but now? When you are alone and adrift. Like Kon Tiki at sea, only with a neon sign lashed to your bamboo mast flashing 'I have no friends! I have no friends!' "
"I learned more from him than from any of my schooling," says Eric's brother Peter Orner, a writer and assistant professor of creative writing at San Francisco State who has a master of fine arts degree and a law degree. "There's no better storyteller that I know."
Growing up, Eric would have the family at the kitchen table in hysterics hearing an account of his day.
"He has always been testing boundaries, too. Now, putting gay sex in print is not so unusual, but back in the day, it was really rare," Peter Orner says. "The thing with his strip, though, is that's not ever been gay or straight -- it's about relationships. Sex and relationships."
Eric Orner began drawing Ethan Green in 1989, when he was working as a political cartoonist for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire.
"I was coming out, going to a lot of bars and clubs, and keeping a notebook about what I saw out in the world at night. The drawings were funny. At the same time, I was drawing a strip for a Cambridge paper about the travails of urban life, and the gay work I was drawing for myself morphed into a story about a young gay guy living in a city."
After he sold Ethan Green, first called Notes From the Bars, to about 100 gay newspapers and alt-weeklies, book deals followed. Five years ago, Orner moved from Boston to L.A. to be an animator at Disney (he has since been laid off and now works for the animation firm Acme Film Works). While he was happy to have Ethan Green made into a live-action film, he hopes also to make the strip into an animated television series or movie.
According to Justin Hall, curator of the recent Cartoon Art Museum show "No Straight Lines: Queer Culture and the Comics," Ethan Green's place in the queer comic world is very well established. "I wanted to find people who were historically important while keeping the emphasis on current work -- Eric's been doing both," Hall says. "He has a longevity that is unusual for comics, and his work just keeps getting better -- more polished, more interesting."
Orner has thrown political material into his work, sending the Hat Sisters -- the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the strip -- to Iraq in 2003 as "Iraqi Arms Inspectresses." He also has contributed art to Bay Area author Stephen Elliott's book "Politically Inspired II: Stumbling and Raging." There, in a sharp contrast to the lighthearted nature of Ethan Green, Orner imagines a world where John Ashcroft is president and abortion is illegal and women who have abortions are killed. Both Peter Orner and Elliott characterize the piece as disturbing, although it, too, is laced with dark humor.
Eric Orner's use of humor has made some of his strip's more risque elements, such as his explicit depiction of sex, more palatable to nervous editors. "My endless joke is that the thing about sex that interests me is how unsexy it is. It's like, Ethan could be having sex with a boyfriend but worrying about making a down payment on condo, or what he'll say the next day. My sexiest visual panels are always about something else, some worry that was going on between people."
As gay characters become more common in mainstream American media, Ethan Green might have lost some of its novelty value as one of the first national gay comic strips, which hasn't diminished Ethan's appeal. "Gay life isn't the exotic subset it was once was, but then, it never really was for the people who lived it," says Eric Orner. "Television has been big in bringing attention about gay people to non-gay people.
"Now, gay people have more interest in straight people and vice versa. I work with some straight guys, and they're interested in how gay people live their lives. They ask me to tell them, oh, about the fight I had with my boyfriend, whereas 10 years ago, they might not have minded that I was gay, but they wouldn't want to hear about it."
He pauses, then adds, "People's love lives will always be interesting to other people."
Reyhan Harmaci (San Francisco Cronicle) - 29 June 2006
In the 15-year life of comic character Ethan Green, L.A. artist Eric Orner has created the perfect vessel to embody the complexities of gay urban life -- although at this point, there is little about "gay urban life" that most Americans wouldn't recognize simply as "adult human life."
Like the Sisyphus of the single world, Ethan dates perpetually. Over and over he hauls his neurosis and anxieties up the hill, only to have them roll back over him. You laugh at his insight and his antics and then put down the comic and try really hard to convince yourself that no matter how many mistakes you and Ethan have both made, you won't end up like him.
After four collections of Orner's strips, which have run in more than a hundred newspapers and alt-weeklies in America and Europe, "The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green" is now a live-action movie, directed by George Bamber, that had its premiere at this year's Frameline (San Francisco's LGBT film festival that concluded Sunday) and opens Friday at the Lumiere. The film, starring Daniel Letterle, David Monahan and "Family Ties" mom Meredith Baxter, went to film festivals around the country before getting picked up for wider release; its run in L.A. and New York City has been extended for three weeks.
In a funny twist, though, neither Ethan's creator nor the film's director is anything close to being single. Orner's been in the same relationship throughout the evolution of Ethan, and Bamber has a 4-year old child with his partner of 11 years.
"Early on, it was an oddity that I was writing about this young guy who was always dating and I had been going out with someone for a while," Orner, 41, says, laughing during a phone interview from Los Angeles. "But maybe over time it went from something that amused me to something that might take me to a therapist.
"But I was single when I got out of college," Orner adds. "Apparently I have a lot to say about that time."
It helps, too, that Ethan has never been a stand-in for Orner himself. While they may share certain traits -- Orner says they are both funny, dorky, irritable and short -- Ethan is a composite of "a thousand stories."
Bamber was actually eating a sushi dinner with his partner (who is also the film's producer) when they hit on the idea of making a movie from Orner's strips.
He rejects the suggestion that being in a relationship stops you from relating to Ethan. "Look, we've all had to date. Whether you're dating the same person for three years or 20 years, it's the same shocking experience.
"There is nothing easy about dating. It's probably like snowboarding: It's thrilling because the chance of wiping out and getting your head bashed is very high.
"Ethan's the only character I've read whose dating life looks worse than my own."
For the film, screenwriter David Vernon boiled down 15 years of Ethan Green into some key elements: his relationship with longtime ex, Leo; his cross-dressing older confidantes, the Hat Sisters; his lesbian roommate Charlotte; and a rebound trick, the irrepressible twink Punch. His employer, pompous weatherman Monty Poole, didn't make it into the movie, although at one point Ethan does take Poole's toupee to the dry cleaners along with his suit. It's a romantic comedy, though; to tell the story in 90 minutes, Ethan's life had to be reduced to the essence of his train-wreck relationships.
But the shock and awe of Ethan's dating life isn't the only reason the comic has flourished for so long. Orner has made Ethan change with the times, riffing on the existence of "Post Post Gays" and snarkily chronicling the adventures of Ethan's best friend, Buck, who has a boyfriend Ethan hates.
Take a strip from 2002, for instance, when Ethan finds himself stranded on the dance floor. He sums up the experience like this: "The dance floor has become uncool. Only the periphery is cool. You can't find Bucky, you can't find Charlotte, you can't even find Jason Chiang, who you're quarreling with, though what better time to make up but now? When you are alone and adrift. Like Kon Tiki at sea, only with a neon sign lashed to your bamboo mast flashing 'I have no friends! I have no friends!' "
"I learned more from him than from any of my schooling," says Eric's brother Peter Orner, a writer and assistant professor of creative writing at San Francisco State who has a master of fine arts degree and a law degree. "There's no better storyteller that I know."
Growing up, Eric would have the family at the kitchen table in hysterics hearing an account of his day.
"He has always been testing boundaries, too. Now, putting gay sex in print is not so unusual, but back in the day, it was really rare," Peter Orner says. "The thing with his strip, though, is that's not ever been gay or straight -- it's about relationships. Sex and relationships."
Eric Orner began drawing Ethan Green in 1989, when he was working as a political cartoonist for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire.
"I was coming out, going to a lot of bars and clubs, and keeping a notebook about what I saw out in the world at night. The drawings were funny. At the same time, I was drawing a strip for a Cambridge paper about the travails of urban life, and the gay work I was drawing for myself morphed into a story about a young gay guy living in a city."
After he sold Ethan Green, first called Notes From the Bars, to about 100 gay newspapers and alt-weeklies, book deals followed. Five years ago, Orner moved from Boston to L.A. to be an animator at Disney (he has since been laid off and now works for the animation firm Acme Film Works). While he was happy to have Ethan Green made into a live-action film, he hopes also to make the strip into an animated television series or movie.
According to Justin Hall, curator of the recent Cartoon Art Museum show "No Straight Lines: Queer Culture and the Comics," Ethan Green's place in the queer comic world is very well established. "I wanted to find people who were historically important while keeping the emphasis on current work -- Eric's been doing both," Hall says. "He has a longevity that is unusual for comics, and his work just keeps getting better -- more polished, more interesting."
Orner has thrown political material into his work, sending the Hat Sisters -- the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the strip -- to Iraq in 2003 as "Iraqi Arms Inspectresses." He also has contributed art to Bay Area author Stephen Elliott's book "Politically Inspired II: Stumbling and Raging." There, in a sharp contrast to the lighthearted nature of Ethan Green, Orner imagines a world where John Ashcroft is president and abortion is illegal and women who have abortions are killed. Both Peter Orner and Elliott characterize the piece as disturbing, although it, too, is laced with dark humor.
Eric Orner's use of humor has made some of his strip's more risque elements, such as his explicit depiction of sex, more palatable to nervous editors. "My endless joke is that the thing about sex that interests me is how unsexy it is. It's like, Ethan could be having sex with a boyfriend but worrying about making a down payment on condo, or what he'll say the next day. My sexiest visual panels are always about something else, some worry that was going on between people."
As gay characters become more common in mainstream American media, Ethan Green might have lost some of its novelty value as one of the first national gay comic strips, which hasn't diminished Ethan's appeal. "Gay life isn't the exotic subset it was once was, but then, it never really was for the people who lived it," says Eric Orner. "Television has been big in bringing attention about gay people to non-gay people.
"Now, gay people have more interest in straight people and vice versa. I work with some straight guys, and they're interested in how gay people live their lives. They ask me to tell them, oh, about the fight I had with my boyfriend, whereas 10 years ago, they might not have minded that I was gay, but they wouldn't want to hear about it."
He pauses, then adds, "People's love lives will always be interesting to other people."
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