Writer/Artist: Alex Robinson
Company: Top Shelf

Alex Robinson, author of mega graphic novels Box Office Poison and Tricked, is back this summer with a shorter tale in Too Cool To Be Forgotten. The length of the book isn’t the only difference, as Robinson focuses in past his usual big ensemble cast and inter-locking stories to tell one story mostly about one character, Andy, a forty-something father who, in trying to cure smoking through hypnosis, winds up re-living his high school years. It sounds like the premise for a wacky comedy, and there are some laughs here, but Robinson does a great job of bringing to life the very real unpleasantness inherent in re-living your high school years, especially if you’re not sure how you got there or how long you’ll be staying.

The high school memoir is a pretty common form of slice-of-life comics, and a lot of the situations in Too Cool are familiar as well. Deciding whether or not to ask out the object of a crush, resisting peer pressure, dealing with jerks, growing up while dealing with family drama, Too Cool is loaded with story elements that everyone has seen. However, in addition to the veracity of the high school experience, Robinson has given the whole thing a new twist with the time travel element. It sounds a bit off-the-wall, but Robinson’s down-to-earth approach, keeping us in the protagonist’s thoughts so we can see him struggling to be the forty-year-old he is in the fifteen-year-old that everybody else sees, gives the whole thing extra dramatic layers rather than a comedic touch or a trippy sci-fi approach.

It’s easy to think “Oh, man, if I were back in high school knowing what I know now…” and think of all the things you’d do differently. Be more confident in yourself, knowing how things turn out. Try to be a better person, since you have the maturity to handle a lot more. But Robinson rightly shows, in Too Cool, that even at forty, most of us still haven’t got everything figured out, and some problems that were minor in high school (like getting to make out with the hot girl) are bigger when you’re older (like realizing the dream girl you’re making out with is 25 years younger than you). Scenes like Andy’s makeout session or trying to reach out to an outcast kid show why adults and teens never seem to quite connect… it’s a different world, high school and the real world, and what may seem cruel and bizarre to an adult is just the way it is to a high school kid. These contrasts, between an experienced viewpoint of adulthood and an embedded viewpoint of a teenager, make up the heart of Too Cool.

Or at least, the heart of one aspect of the story. It’s easy to get entranced by Andy’s high school life, since Robinson has so effectively brought it to life. Even though Andy is constantly thinking thoughts of his other life, and thinking about the hypnosis technique that has brought him here, it’s hard not to see the high school life as realer than the little glimpses of Andy’s adult life that we’ve seen. Certainly Robinson brings the ’80s setting to life with hairstyles, clothes, furniture and such, and his character design for Andy, combining braces and thick, nerdy glasses that Robinson uses to highlight almost all of Andy’s expressions, has the reader focusing throughout on Andy as a teenager. Because Andy is convinced early on that he’s figured out how to solve his smoking problem, it seems like the actual conflicts of the story are the conflicts of his teenage era tale. Conflicts like asking out girls, dealing with family and friends and of course the inevitable run-ins with authority figures when someone with the confidence of an adult starts acting like one despite his teenage status.

However, the emotional core of Too Cool remains based in the framing sequence, the story of Andy’s quest to quit smoking. His deduction for why he’s regressed to high school and how that will help him quit smoking is a simple, surface assumption, and it makes sense that he wouldn’t quite grasp the psychological realities of what he’s supposed to solve until it’s upon him. Robinson teases the reader throughout with hints, but it’s hard to guess exactly what it is until it’s upon us as well, and when we do get the emotional catharsis scene, it’s extremely powerful, because we’ve seen Andy thinking in sort of mundane, surface problem ways, and when we learn the true root of his smoking, and the emotional void he’s been filling with that vice, it’s a powerful moment. Robinson’s artwork in that moment is also exceptional, dropping out every bit of excess background so that the relationship and conflict of the two characters is thrown into sharp relief. I also love the way that Robinson switches between young Andy and old Andy in this scene, showing how intertwined the problem is in the root of both versions of the character’s psyche.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten is another gem of a graphic novel from Alex Robinson. Less concerned with the narrative tricks of inter-weaving a massive cast than his previous graphic novels, Too Cool features the most intensive character study Robinson has done, and it pays off with some of the strongest emotional resonance his work has had. If you’ve enjoyed Robinson’s past graphic novels, you’ll no doubt be as glad as I am to see a new one. And if you’ve never tried out Robinson’s particular brand of character-driven drama, Too Cool is a perfect book to give a try.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten is due for a July release. This is an early review.