Barney has had a very interesting & inspiring life.The author nailed both the art caricatures & witty references. I enjoyed the humorous portrayals of several American political figures such as Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Tip O’Neill, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, & George W.Barney Frank’s life and career is a testament that positive change is possible, & that it will take a lot of hard work & cooperation. The difficulties of corruption, corporate lobbying, partisanship, & propaganda were also clearly addressed, but in a way that inspires me to keep fighting at the grassroots level for positive change. How politicians, activists, journalists, academics, & regular old constituents come together to get stuff done. I like following domestic US politics, & it was quite interesting seeing the ins-&-outs of local New England (& later on, national) politics in the decades before I was born, & in a part of the country I’ve never lived in.Written by one of Barney Frank’s former staffers, the stories & anecdotes are detailed, personal, & authentic. As Frank's longtime staff counsel and press secretary, Eric Orner lends his first-hand perspective to this extraordinary work of history, paying tribute to the mighty striving of committed liberals to defend ordinary Americans from an assault on their shared society.I really enjoyed this biography of a hardworking congressional representative dedicated to helping people & fighting for civil rights & good government. But more than a biography of an indispensable LGBTQ pioneer, this funny, beautifully rendered, warts-and-all graphic account reveals the down-and-dirty inner workings of Boston and DC politics.

What are the odds that a disheveled, zaftig, closeted kid with the thickest of Jersey accents might wind up running Boston on behalf of a storied Irish Catholic political machine, drafting the nation's first gay rights laws, reforming Wall Street after the Great Recession, and finding love, after a lifetime assuming that he couldn't and wouldn't? In Smahtguy: The Life and Times of Barney Frank, one of America's first out members of Congress and a gay and civil rights crusader for an era is confirmed as a hero of our age. Eric Orner, the acclaimed cartoonist of one of the country's most popular and longest-running gay comic strips, The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green, presents his debut graphic novel-a dazzling, irreverent biography of the iconic and iconoclastic Barney Frank, one of the first gay and out congressmen and a front-line defender of civil rights.