David Chelsea In Love #1 - Eclipse

July 1991 - Another odd little magazine I found at the 2008 NY Comic Con--I had absolutely no idea what this was, but for $1.00 I was willing to find out.

This is a long-form (43 pages!) story, written and drawn by David Chelsea about a guy looking for love named...David Chelsea. I guess this is what you'd a roman à comic.

Anyway, the comic book David Chelsea is your typical guy, shy and a bit too insecure, henpecked by his critical, over-mothering sister. He goes with her to a party and there he meets Minnie, a gawky, kinda goofy looking woman with whom he is immediately smitten. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that.

Chelsea's art is an interesting hybrid of styles, and its pages like this, with their intricate backgrounds and heavy-lined figures popping off them, that make me think of Little Nemo, visually at least:

...indeed, there's even ad for a Little Nemo collection in the back of the issue.

Minnie has a boyfriend whose a jerk, and even though she's attracted to David, they can't quite consummate their feelings for one another. So David goes on a string of ill-advised hook-ups with other women (can't quite relate to that...if only I could), that are told in fairly sexually explicit terms.

We also get to see a bit of David's life a commercial artist:

(..."They just want a few changes"? I can relate to that, no problem.)

We also get to see things from Minnie's perspective, in pages like this that mix fanciful symbolism with gritty reality:

The minute you have "the boyfriend" hit a woman, the woman the protagonist is in love with, you've got a hissable villain as reliable as a Nazi in a war comic. Hopefully this part isn't based on anyone's real life, but I'm guessing it is.

The issue ends with David and Minnie about to meet up again, but she is sporting a bruise that David is one panel away from seeing, making for a pretty exciting cliffhanger of an ending, and enough to make me want to find the next issue, at least.

David Chelsea in Love was another of the experiments in the magazine format Eclipse tried, this one lasting four issues. Why they went for the magazine size we don't know, but it does give the feeling for the slightly more adult story that lies therein.