Ethan Green Alert


		*Above:* Eric Orner’s pen lines are made flesh — — and comely flesh it promises to be, too!
Cartoonists getting movies made from their comics. Hey, I’m for that! Maybe that Stuck Rubber Baby movie of my fantasies will actually make it onto celluloid someday after all! Meanwhile, we LGBT cartoonists of the world can take pleasure in the imminent arrival onscreen of characters created by one of our own. I was informed this week that a film version of Eric Orner‘s hugely popular gay comic strip *The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green* is about to burst upon us. No doubt about it: it’s the queer tooners’ turn. Frank Miller got *Sin City* into the multiplexes.Road to Perdition, the graphic novel brain-child of Max Allen Collins and Richard Piers Rayner team, made the leap. Terry Zwigoff steered Daniel Clowes‘ *Ghost World* onto the screen and now has done the same thing with *Art School Confidential. The movie version of Harvey Pekar‘s American Splendor* knocked everybody dead. Meanwhile, pushy filmmakers can’t stop themselves from making Alan Moore comics into films (*League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; V For Vendetta) no matter how persistently Moore refuses their money and spits in their eyes. You go, Ethan! I know Eric slightly. I was on a "Gays In Comics" panel with him at an Out/Write in Boston a couple of decades ago. We didn’t shmooze a lot, since he was sitting at the opposite end of a very* long table for the entire program, but his comments were enjoyable. A less cluttered bonding experience with him came in 2001, when *The Advocate* asked the two of us to collaborate on a "jam" strip in which Eric’s title character would be interviewed by my own gay character from an earlier era, Wendel Trupstock.

	For anyone who’s curious, Eric’s and my jam strip, having been offered first to Advocate readers in the magazine’s August 15, 2001 issue, can now be found in the back pages of my omnibus collection *Wendel All Together*. If you get a chance to read it sometime and sense a certain unseemly jockeying for position between the two cartoon icons, your intuition isn’t playing tricks on you. Eric and I agreed that it would be funnier to allow intergenerational tension to simmer below the surface than to subject readers to a respectful sincerity-fest.