Queens Tribune

On the way back to their Astoria home one evening four years ago, Alan Bessen and his wife Stacey saw a man with a long, disheveled beard. And with that one simple observation a comic book personality was born, resulting in Alan’s first-ever self-published comic book.

“We were driving home from Long Island one day and saw this guy with a long scraggly beard and my wife said jokingly, ‘look at that Fuzzboy,’ and the name just clicked,” Bessen said of the main character in his latest creation, The Dimension Known as Fuzzboy.

Bessen went home and started drawing sketches that night and the next thing he knew, a comic book was evolving.

“I was able to put out one strip every couple of weeks,” he said.

The artist, who had graduated 16 years earlier from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, found Fuzzboy to be the force to keep him in tune with cartooning.

The comic strip focuses around everyday humorous occurrence s that happen to him and his wife. Fuzzboy’s daily adventures are sprinkled with embellishments that will evoke empathy from readers who have been in Fuzzboy’s shoes, Bessen said.

“We will be somewhere together and my wife will say whether or not something is Fuzzboy wor thy,” Bessen said of how he determines Fuzzboy’s day.

“But then I need to figure out why he would be in that situation,” he added. “Because it’s not always the same reason why my wife and I were in the situation.”

Fuzzboy is a character that is not like many others walking down the streets of Queens; he is supposed to be marginalized by society and just an observer of life, said Bessen. Plus, Fuzzboy is unemployed.

“Lately we have been kind of cooking,” Bessen said, with a laugh, of the sketches he has been producing. For The Dimension Known as Fuzzboy, Bessen originally had a digest size collection of 60 pages and decided to scale it down to make the 32-page black-and-white book that is currently on the shelves at Seaburn Book in Long Island City.

“It was all my wife’s idea to get it into the local book store,” he said. “We knew the owner was looking for local authors so I gave it a chance.”

Bessen considers himself a cartoony cartoonist he said. His work is supposed to be a throwback to the golden days of car tooning, a style he finds to have a mystique to it.

“I ink with a brush, which is completely archaic,” he said with a laugh. “But I did a lot of painting for a while and I like the look of retro work.”

Bessen, a Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie strip fan, was taught under the old pen at SVA by legendary car toonists Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of Mad Magazine, and Will Eisner, who created the first graphic novel in the 1950s.

“Kurtzman used this layering technique that I have applied to so much of my work,” Bessen said. “He would begin with a rough sketch and then go into the process of tightening it,” a technique Bessen used for Fuzzboy strips.

While Bessen’s work is a throwback in drawing style, the autobiographical nature of his work reaches far and wide as Fuzzboy ponders the fad of scooters, becomes frustrated by mass transit and gives in to horoscopes. He said his work has always been produced with alternative cartoonist influences in mind – not traditional newspaper strips.

“I really can’t do anything with three tiny panels,” Bessen said. “I want to be able to draw and develop till the story til it’s worthwhile.”