Too Cool To Be Forgotten
"Too Cool To Be Forgotten" Helps Us Remember What Makes Comics Good!
Too Cool To Be Forgotten
May 5th, 2008 - First things first--I don't really get the title. Though the super-cool cover of the graphic novel makes reference to a pack of Kool cigarettes, I don't really know what it has to do with the rest of the story. He's not necessarily cool, and what happens to him isn't necessarily cool. So that's offputting.
Also, I never read any of Alex (Box Office Poison) Robinson's other work, so this was my introduction to someone who seems to be largely regarded as a leader in the indie/graphic novel field, and, honestly, it's easy to see why.
As you might have already guessed, this is 'indie' comics--a catchall term I'm using here for comics that are about regular people in regular situations. By that I mean they don't tend to traffic in the extraordinary; no superheroes, no monsters, no occult shenanigans; just people experiencing life, and a comics creator telling us a story that we can easily imagine happening to us or someone we know. So why am I reviewing "Too Cool To Be Forgotten" in The Wyrd? Because something weird happens in it. A forty-something-year-old man goes to a hypnotist to try to kick his smoking habit. Somehow, when he's under hypnosis, he travels back to his high-school-age body so that he's now a forty-something-year-old reliving high school. Simple, easy-to-understand premise, and just weird enough to qualify it for coverage in "The Wyrd" (I'm also waiting for the day that a movie studio picks this up).
To cut to the chase: it hits all the right notes. It's very clever. It's wish-fulfillment of a sort we're not used to in comics. Instead of wanting to be indestructible, leap tall buildings in a single bound, or be the best there is at what we do, here we're invited to think back on our younger selves and wonder what it would be like if we knew then what we know now. And it's remarkable that this book allows your imagination to wander while clearly telling its own tale; you get to know the character of Andy Wick both as a grown-up and as a teenager, reliving some momentous events that (he figures out along the way) will lead to his being cured of his nicotine addiction.
And in this journey he rediscovers lost moments from an easier time, he's uncharacteristically (for a teenager) pleasant to his mother, he tries to be nice to his trouble-bound sister, and he keeps missing the point of why he's really there. He gets caught up in the memory-as-moment-ness of going to a momentous party from his youth, where he'll try cigarettes for the first time in order to look cool to some older girls. He figures that'll fix it and he'll be free to go back home to his life with his wife and daughter. But of course, that doesn't happen. What DOES happen is a great, fulfilling, and emotional capper to this story, and something I honestly didn't see coming. Well, not exactly in the way it happened, anyway.
So I'm not going to ruin it for you. I'm just going to tell you that it's an emotionally powerful, simple-in-a-good-way, surprisingly fun read, and it's one of those rare comics that help define the medium as more than just escapism. I know it's stayed with me long after most comics I've read (including such uber-lauded books as "Jimmy Corrigan: Boy Genius"), and I'm tempted to call it "Too Good To Be Forgotten". The younger me would have done that. Luckily the older me prevented that from happening.
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