LGBTQ Pioneer Barney Frank’s Story Is Now a Graphic Novel

Eric Orner is known for a comic strip, “The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green,” which had a long run in the Washington Blade and other gay papers, but he’s also worked in politics, mainly for former congressman Barney Frank. A few years ago, Frank asked Orner if he’d tell his story. “He said he had some reservations about the books about him,” Orner recalls. “He wished there was something that captured the humanity and the struggle.” Orner’s not a biographer, so he was uncertain. “I kicked it around before I thought, ‘Well, I could draw it.’ ” The result is the new graphic novel—er, biography—Smahtguy, which captures Frank’s closeted early life; coming out and surviving a sex scandal; and his Capitol Hill career. Click the arrow next to the image below to read an excerpt and see Orner’s thoughts on how he approached the project.

Here’s Frank celebrating the passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank act, which overhauled the financial regulatory system. “Barney was blunt, was willing to be dis-liked, and certainly wasn’t blow-dried,” Orner says. “You’d think the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee is the consummate insider, but here’s a guy who’s been an out­sider his whole life.”

Orner has an intuitive feel for how Frank speaks and thinks, due in part to time they spent driving around Frank’s district: “It helped me know how he sounds. If you can envision what [somebody’s] going to say, that’s a window into how they feel about something.”

Orner never met Tip O’Neill, but the legendary House speaker was a key figure in Frank’s career: “It was well known that Tip wanted Barney to be speaker”—which didn’t happen. “If you like Boston politics, you probably have a Tip O’Neill story, so I tried to throw a few in.”

Orner compares creating a graphic novel to shooting a movie, in which you have to think in terms of scenes and also consider how to frame a shot. “You’re not filming it, but you might as well be,” he says. “I like to evoke a mood. I’m not some beautiful artist, but in my visual vernacular, I want you to know what it looks like.”

This article appears in the May 2022 issue of Washingtonian.

Bill O'Sullivan

Senior Managing Editor

Bill O’Sullivan is senior managing editor; from 1999 to 2007, he was a features editor. In another lifetime, he was assistant managing editor. Somewhere in the middle, he was managing editor of Common Boundary magazine and senior editor at the Center for Public Integrity. His personal essays have been cited three times among the notable essays of the year in The Best American Essays. He teaches at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda.