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The Mostly Fabulous Interview of Eric Orner  Eric Orner and I met while vacationing on the coast of Ecovia. I was checking out the volcano, and who should I see in the distance, barely outrunning the lava flow? With a great leap, he clambered up to the lowest balcony and then up to mine. If nothing else, the man knows how to make an entrance. With the streets sizzling from Ecovia’s latest eruption and the premiere of Eric’s movie “The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green” only weeks away, I suggested that we pass the time chatting over a glass of wine (it was too hot for coffee that day) out on the veranda. And, since I happen to write for PopImage, the conversation naturally turned to discussing his thoughts on making the jump from the printed page to the big screen. How has taking Ethan Green from the printed page to the live-action world affected your storytelling? Squashing 15 years worth of comic strip into an hour and a half's worth of feature film basically means you're creating a different animal entirely. David Vernon (the film's screenwriter) and George Bamber (the director) convinced me early on in the five-year process that they'd treat my characters and storylines with a lot of care in adapting my stuff for film. I think they did that. Visually, many of the shots in the film are based closely on frames in the strip, which was very gratifying. Did you originally conceive of doing Ethan Green as a full-length animated picture, or did you always think the story should go live-action? Creating a live action Ethan Green project appealed to me artistically in the sense that it was exciting to work with artists in what was to me a foreign media. To me it was akin to, say, when prose is adapted for a dance project. That different. Doing the live action movie didn't end my ambition to create an animated TV series, which is a medium I've always felt is much closer in character to a newspaper comic strip: Obviously the need to tie the whole thing down after 90 minutes disappears. And animation allows for the sort of magical realism-flights of fancy that were a staple of my cartoon, but which I think can seem embarrassing when attempted in live-action. For example, in the strip, Ethan sometimes astral projects in his yoga class. The instructor asks the yoga students to take their mind to a place of harmony, causing Ethan not to wind up on the shore of a tranquil lake but instead at a cruise bar on Mars, where he strikes up a fuck-buddy-ship with a conceited Martian named Queelix. We didn't attempt that sort of thing in the film. I'd still like to in animation. Any characters you're particularly proud of that didn't make the cut from 15 years of storyline to 90 minutes of movie? A lot of them. Mostly the sort of "character actors" in Ethan's melodrama: Madame Zolna, Ethan's fortune teller and psuedo therapist; Etienne, the Bastard Chef from Montreal; Lyle the mean hair stylist ("Style by Lyle"); Activo and Pasivo, the tempermental Venezuelan identical twin porn stars (who fight over Ethan in his fantasies)… What do you think about the trend of turning comics into live-action box-office blockbusters in general? I guess its good for cartoonists. Though to tell you the truth, I haven't seen a lot of these movies that I truly loved. And I disliked a lot of them. Remember Dick Tracy way back when? Jeez. Spiderman I liked. Early Ethan Green seemed very Boston-based. How has living in LA affected your worldview, and the world of the comic? The early strips were kind of heavy on Boston streetscapes, but the strip was never about Boston (though the graphic novel I am currently working on is). In the mid-90s, Ethan was [being]published in close to a 100 small gay and alt weekly newspapers. That's a lot of localities to keep happy - and its not easy to keep publishing in Dallas if the folks down there think you're only interested in goings on at Harvard. So, I sprinkled my strip with lots of local references. Ethan tricked in the Russian River as well as in P-Town. He had this nasty involvement with Etienne Le Bastard Chef au Montreal, which caused Canadians to think the strip was about up there. I've lived all over the country and have affection and interest in a lot of places. I like to think that came through in my work. What inspired you to start drawing comics? Mad Magazine. I like wiseguy stuff. What inspired you to start drawing Ethan Green? My day job right out of college was working for a daily newspaper in New Hampshire drawing political cartoons. At night and on weekends I'd find my way to gay dives where I'd receive an eyeful (sometimes more). I guess I wanted to record (or make fun of) it, but obviously I didn't really have an appropriate outlet for in the pages of the Concord Daily Monitor. So I started to draw these cartoons about life in the bars, mostly for myself, just to be stuffed in a notebook. That the cartoon originated as reporting from bars and clubs (and baths and back rooms and bushes and rest stops) is evident in its title "The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life..." Ethan definitely wasn't about work or family or even romance… to begin with, anyway. How did the Hat Sisters make their way into your comic, anyway? Same reason. When I was discovering what used to be called "The Sub Culture" (but is now called, I guess, I dunno, "Will and Grace?") one of the first and most exotic species I encountered was drag queens. I was taken to P-Town by a difficult and controlling first boyfriend (he always wanted me to part my hair the wrong way). I was at the legendary Boat Slip "T-dance" when these enormous creatures, really the size of Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloons (if those balloons wore Vera Wang) floated my way and planted a kiss on the top of my head. I drew my own version of these guys into a strip and they quickly became Ethan's "Aunties": the sort of older gay guys who invite him over for dinner and do a lot of pinching his cheek. Real fairy godmothers. From your blog, it sounds like you have a pretty fabulous social life now (or at least a great lover). Do people still assume that you ARE Ethan Green? And are you, secretly? Come on, you can tell me. Look, what could be more oppressive and uninteresting than sitting around listening to someone go on about their blissful union. So I don't. I tell stories about dating disasters and ruined romance and love sickness and unfaithful bastards and conceited pricks and... well you get the idea. Ethan is mostly single. I'm not. In that essential way, we are pretty different. Speaking of which, you still look a bit scalded from the lava flow. Would you care to borrow my shower? Heh, I guess I am a bit stinky from outrunning that eruption. I’ll be back in five. Eric excuses himself to take a shower, giving me the chance to try to come up with some more insightful questions. Unfortunately I’m too distracted by the thought of a cute man who isn’t my boyfriend in the shower, and by his humming “This Guy’s in Love with You” and more of the Burt Bachrach songbook than one man should really know 20 minutes later, he emerges, wearing a couple of towels, and we continue the conversation, shifting the topic to more general geekery. How was it moving from drawing and lettering Ethan Green by hand to doing so much of it on the computer? Do you feel like you've lost/gained anything by the transition? I've never been a great purist about lettering. I hand letter when for whatever reason I think whatever I'm working on needs a certain look. I use digital font when I don't think it matters. It matters to me if the perspective is fucked up, or if the hand is drawn badly, or if the expression is blank because I haven't figured out how to express an emotion visually with lips and eyes and a tilt of the head. I've got less of a… my mom would say “bugaboo”, which I guess means stick up my ass… about lettering than about those other things. You mention in your blog that you insisted on learning how to do everything for your web site yourself. How did that go for you? Any secret aspirations to leave comics for the fabulous world of web design? Not web design, though I do like knowing as much as I can about it. Over the past 6 years I have worked a lot more in animation -- and it's those skills -- 2d and now just a bit of 3d, that interest me and that I continue to learn. Who's your favorite X-Men character? Wolverine, I guess. But really, my comics taste runs more to Sergio Aragoines and Al Jaffee. It was a trick question, really. Let's say Marvel or DC wanted to create an Ethan Green universe crossover: Who'd be your dream guest artist? What would his super power be? He might change in to a suit and become "Passive Aggressive Man” or maybe “Gossip Guy”. For an artist, I'd like Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, the guys that did Love and Rockets. Any particular media figures (fictitious or otherwise) that you'd like to see come out of the closet? Not really. Sometimes I can think of a few gay celebrities that I wouldn't mind seeing go back in to the closet. Anything else you’d like to add? It looks like they’ve started to clear a path through the lava if you want to get back to your villa. Eric leans over the balcony to check out the state of the streets, but a gust of hot wind from the volcano blows his towel up and off, sending him running for it and, alas, cutting short our time together.
 Jay Laird is Lead Game Designer for Metaversal Studios and is the writer of SHEEPOCALYPSE, which appears weekly right here at PopImage.  PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum. E-Mail Us - E-Mail Us To Comment On This Article. Ethan Green.com Ethan Green: The Movie Industrial Archive - Read past Industrial articles |
