Off-beat comic strip brings humor home to Chelsea

Volume One, Issue 17, January 19 - 25, 2007

By Lawrence Lerner

Chelsea has long attracted the attention of artists and creative types. Many have taken up residence in the neighborhood during its long and storied history, while others have paid homage to the area for its mix of charm and eclecticism. But it wasn’t until eight years ago that Chelsea got its very own comic strip, which ensures that one of New York’s most dynamic zip codes will be inscribed in the annals of pop culture yet again.

“Chelsea Boys,” the brainchild of illustrators Glen Hanson and Allan Neuwirth, takes a satirical look at the city’s gay scene by chronicling the lives of three gay male roommates sharing an apartment in New York City’s Chelsea district. It began as a weekly comic strip in Next magazine in August 1998 and is now syndicated in dozens of gay publications throughout the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Spain.

The collaboration between Hanson and Neuwirth, not surprisingly, has spawned hundreds of strips, many of which were compiled in their first “Chelsea Boys” collection, published by Alyson Books in 2003. Next Wednesday, the pair will be feted by the magazine that gave them their start, when they celebrate the release of their much-anticipated second collection, “Chelsea Boys: Steppin’ Out!” (Bruno Gmünder Books), with a book-signing party at midtown’s Therapy nightclub.

“The book-signing is really just an excuse for a party,” said Neuwirth. “Who can say no to a good party?”

By turns thoughtful and funny, poignant and irreverent, “Chelsea Boys” follows the exploits of Nathan, a short, neurotic Jewish fellow who, at 45, boasts a pear-shaped figure and prominent goatee; Sky, the buff, blond 23-year-old baby of the bunch, raised on a farming commune in Canada and now an art student in Manhattan; and Soiree, a fabulous black club diva of 30 who masks his inner pain with biting wit and flamboyant style.

The three come together when Nathan, who has just lost his lover to AIDS, advertises for roommates so he can make rent and keep his beautiful Chelsea apartment. The characters, who couldn’t be more different on the surface, learn over time to thrive as a family unit while navigating the usual highs and lows of family life.

“It was a relationship born of need that turned into a family,” said Neuwirth. “We purposely stuck three very diverse characters together to see what happens—it’s a classic story-telling device.”

That the characters vary widely in age was also part of the formula, according to Neuwirth, given the perennial attraction between old and young.

“Both gain and learn from that difference. The older one—in this case, Nathan—is more settled while the younger ones are figuring out their way in the world. Vitality and energy co-existing under one roof: That’s also classic,” said Neuwirth. “Besides, the gay community is so age-conscious and age-phobic. You’re invisible over 40. Yet the maturity you’ve gained can be quite attractive to the younger pups.”

Giving birth to the boys

Hanson, who is exactly 40 — and therefore “on the verge of extinction” — initially conceived “Chelsea Boys” not as a comic strip but as a gay animation television series while living in his native Toronto in 1994, before shows such as “Ellen,” “Will & Grace” and “Queer As Folk” had emerged.

“There was no gay-centric programming back then—Hollywood wasn’t ready yet,” said Hanson. “But I kept thinking, How great if there were an animated TV show where the main characters were gay. Let’s see where that takes us.”

Hanson first thought to pitch his idea to gay networks in the U.S., so he contacted Lou Maletta’s Gay Cable Network, then located in Chelsea, near F.I.T., but soon discovered the studio was ill-suited for producing animation. Hanson then found Neuwirth, who is 45, through an ad in a local magazine, where he was publicizing his animation production business.

“We met, hit it off, and I thought, Wow—gay, animation producer, perfect!” said Hanson, an illustrator and animator by trade who also works as an art director for animated TV series. “We also had similar work experience, humor and ways of seeing the world, which has helped enormously.”

With a collaborator in tow and ready to go, Hanson had only one problem: A television deal in the mid-1990s was elusive for a show with three gay characters. So, the pair took the advice of people in the entertainment industry and decided to first gain public awareness for their characters in print, in the form of a syndicated comic strip. After pitching the idea to Next magazine, where Hanson was illustrating at the time, “Chelsea Boys” the comic strip was born.

“It started off as a weekly but quickly shifted to bi-weekly when we realized how much work it was, especially on top of our busy freelance schedules,” said Neuwirth.

But that didn’t stop the pair from trying to distribute the strip far and wide. The next year, they reached out to more publications and steadily grew the syndication channels for “Chelsea Boys” until it reached not only across the country but north of the border and across the Atlantic Ocean in dozens of gay media outlets.

“We never pushed to get the strip into straight publications,” said Neuwirth. “We’ve been speaking primarily to a gay audience with this, though we know a lot of straight people who love the strip.”

TV deals, however, have remained elusive.

“Last year, we came close to a deal with LOGO, the gay television channel owned by MTV Networks, but it fell through year and a half into development because of money,” said Neuwirth. “There was also talk of putting it on Viacom as a cross-platform program, where it would have reached a straight audience as well.”

“Chelsea Boys” reflects the ecumenical spirit of its authors, who have their characters interact with people of all classes, races and sexual orientations.

Along the way, Hanson and Neuwirth execute a thoughtful blend of the serious and comic: as in one strip, when Nathan and his sister search for their Alzheimer’s-inflicted mother, only to find her at a cemetery on Long Island—where she and the sister live—standing over her dead husband’s tombstone late at night, castigating him for not coming home on time.

Refreshingly, the strip also avoids playing into stereotypes, even as Hanson and Neuwirth populate their world with gay archetypes. The result: complex characters and storylines that defy expectations while appearing instantly recognizable to readers.

“People are rarely who we think they are at first glance, and we wanted our project to reflect that. We wanted characters with dimension that people could relate to,” said Hanson.

Meanwhile, he and Neuwirth never met a dirty joke they didn’t want to tell, or a celebrity—gay, closeted or straight—who they could resist lampooning. The latter show up in “Chelsea Boys” frequently, with the closeted ones going by aliases such as the famed, wealthy fashion designer Kelvin Cohen, who in one strip picks Sky to be his next underwear model.

“Glen has a phenomenal caricature style, so they always look exactly like the people we’re poking fun at, even if the names are changed,” said Neuwirth.

“Often, the famous personalities are identified, like in one strip, when Nathan passes an old building he once lived in while strolling the neighborhood with Sky. Out of nostalgia, they ring the bell and are ushered in, only to discover the new occupants are Liza Minelli and David Gest, who believe Nathan and Sky are the two escorts they ordered to join in their very strange playtime activities, which may have involved a ‘Winged Monkey’ costume, trained seals, peanut butter enemas, and Nudie Twister,” said Neuwirth, “though I can’t really remember. This is a family publication, right?”

Compatible cartoonists

Such tongue-in-cheek humor comes naturally to Neuwirth, who began illustrating and doing comedy impersonations as a kid in Washington Heights, and Hanson, a self-described diva with a deadpan delivery.

Hanson, who migrated to New York City from Toronto in 1995, relocated to Los Angeles three years ago. But that hasn’t hampered the collaboration between the pair, who now rely largely on the phone and Internet to brainstorm ideas and develop, storyboard and revise strips.

Since Hanson and Neuwirth both write and draw, they conceive and script each installment together––often acting them out––before one of them (usually Hanson) sits down to illustrate. They then review the rough sketch together to make changes in the dialogue and visuals before the pencils are cleaned up by Hanson and inked by colleague Angelo Divino, and then cleaned up again by Neuwirth on computer.

“Each strip takes a day to write, a day to do the rough and three days to do the final,” said Hanson. “In that same time, we could be making much more money doing our commercial freelance work. But we enjoy being starving artists.”

Repeatedly dropping everything to generate the next strip can be taxing for Neuwirth and Hanson, who admit they have hit walls in the past and have nearly chucked the whole project out of sheer exhaustion.

Ironically, sometimes the best strips emerge when the two are at a loss for ideas.

For instance, Neuwirth recalls sitting in a delapidated Chinese restaurant where he and Hanson would often hash out storylines while Hanson lived in New York. The year was 2000, and the tandem were pulling their hair out trying to come up with a strip, when they remembered a news story circulating at the time about gays being put into therapy to transform them—“as if gay people can be turned straight,” said Neuwirth.

“We both just rolled our eyes at this one, and out came our Dupa Diva strip starring Soiree as a super hero fighting Judge Mental, the villain, who was putting diverse gay people through his ex-gay transformation machine and making them come out pregnant, Republican and what have you,” said Neuwirth. “It was a two-part strip and turned out to be one of our best. We made a political point we’d never made before, and did it in an entertaining and symbolic way.”

In fact, while the authors didn’t set out to be topical in the vein of “Doonesbury,” “Chelsea Boys” often ventures into political territory, though not without a requisite dose of campiness.

“We plan our character storylines months in advance, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be spontaneous, especially when something is politically pressing,” said Neuwirth. “If you’re a thinking, feeling, caring person who gets outraged by what’s going on around you, you can’t help but comment on it, so we’ve interrupted storylines to do politically motivated one-offs, which has been very satisfying.

It is also gratifying to see their next collection out in print, according to Neuwirth. He and Hanson look forward the reaction they will get in a few months, after “Chelsea Boys: Steppin’ Out!” gets into the hands of old and new fans alike.

“It’s always nice to see the strips compiled and see what people think when they can take the strip in as a whole,” said Neuwirth. “It gives you just a great perspective on what has been really a labor of love for us.”