45 Days Of CCS, #3: Chuck Forsman

Chuck Forsman's career has seen a lot of unpredictability. Even his most extreme genre projects were always oddly paced and filled with many moments of reflection. In a fantasy anthology like Snake Oil, the demons had their own side conversations that had nothing to do with the humans they were torturing. In The End Of The Fucking World, the small moments defined the relationship between the two leads to an achingly painful extent. Even in his hyper-violent ode to 80s action b-movies, Revenger, Forsman had long stretches of flashbacks and monologue time in between his carefully crafted fight scenes. 

That said, I still wasn't prepared for his ode to John Stanley comics filtered through a sleazy, nasty lens called Here Comes...Chesley. The title character, Chesley Gooseneck, is revealed to be an orphan whose parents hanged themselves. Young Chesley keeps a noose around his neck as a reminder. He pals around his rich pal Morty Sweetstock and gets into adventures that are like demented Harvey Comics. In the opener, we meet the appropriately named Bert Crime, a homeless grifter who accidentally kills his dog in the first story and then tries to swindle Chesley and Morty with a "candy mine." Morty tricks Bert ala a Richie Rich scheme, but Chesley is genuinely beside himself with sorrow for making Bert feel bad. In a subtle way, this story and the comic in general are a master class in how to use subtle details to create atmosphere. Forsman's use of a flat, four-color color scheme that mimics the sort of comics he's doing an homage to, complete with dropping out background details in flavor of bold color swashes. His character design feels like it's something old fashioned without there being a particular artist or style he's referencing. The way he draws hair, for example, is highly stylized: three swoops for Morty, an unruly mop for Chesley, and a Josephine Baker-style hairdo for Myrna. 

Forsman does something else that's interesting: he follows Chesley as he gets older. First, he and Morty bribe a clown to let them into the "Lurid Exotic Ladies" show at the carnival, only for the dancer (Myrna Lovely) to chastise them for sneaking in. As it turns out, she's Morty's lover. The running theme of Chesley constantly being traumatized by everything to the point of total surrender but being attracted to people cooler than him leads to painfully wistful encounters with a skateboarder and a weird girl at school.

 There's an essential sweetness to this sad sack of a character that is brought into sharp relief in the story "Extremity." Here, an older, teenage Chesley is going down on his girlfriend, who stops him because she's not in the mood but notices fork marks on his hand. He recounts the cops picking up him for graffiti, his cruel grandmother drugging him, and then stabbing him with a fork when he had trouble waking up. There's a matter-of-factness to Chesley's acceptance of his misery, yet there's an agency that suggests that he will only tolerate so much. His essential sweetness is unchanged and he's still very much a clod of a teenager, but no matter what happens to him, he's always surrounded by people who like him and even stand up for him. Despite all the mayhem, it's one of Forsman's less nihilistic comics, even if the road to meaning is difficult.