The season of tent-pole summer comics releases is here, with Marvel and DC Comics battling for fan affection with Secret Invasion and Final Crisis, respectively. But this year, indie publisher Top Shelf is throwing out its own big summer book, though it's the antithesis of the aforementioned superhero battles.
In July, Top Shelf will release Too Cool to Be Forgotten, the latest graphic novel by Alex Robinson, the story of a middle-aged man who undergoes hypnosis to try to curb his smoking, only to wake up back in 1985 and stuck in his high school years. Robinson is one of Top Shelf's "flagship cartoonists," publisher Chris Staros said, and Robinson's previous books, Box Office Poison and Tricked, have gone through multiple printings and perennially rank among the company's top sellers.
"I fully expect Too Cool to Be Forgotten to build on their sales and, in fact, surpass them," Staros said. "This deluxe hardcover, along with the amazing cover design by Matt Kindt, is going to knock people's socks off. Just the idea of having a second chance at high school is something everyone has had a fantasy—or nightmare—about, so everyone is going to relate to this one."
At the center of Too Cool is Andy Wicks, a 40-something dad who has a comfortable enough life working as a computer technician. His only problem is a smoking habit that he just can't kick, leading him to a hypnosis session. (For the record, Robinson says he's never been a smoker.) He comes to in the midst of a high school studying session, his adult mind suddenly stuck in his teenage body. It's a setup that's been done plenty of times before, but Robinson approaches the hackneyed territory with new eyes, fleshing out unique and believable characters in that most awkward setting.
As Staros said, "It's Back to the Future meets, well, Alex Robinson." For Robinson—a self-described high school loner—the story served as a chance to turn his thoughts back to those years and confront some of the lasting issues he had.
"When I started out, I wanted to make Andy's experience as close to my own as possible, since my incentive to do the story was almost like art therapy in that I was trying to figure out why high school looms so large in my mind and how I could try and deal with that," Robinson said. "I think I realized that wouldn't work pretty early on, and our lives wound up differing a lot. I think he became a lot more 'normal' than I was.
"I was a real loner in high school. I had a circle of friends, which Andy's friends pretty much mimic, but I never went to parties or dated or anything," Robinson continued. "I would spend a lot of my free time drawing comics, which must be some kind of lesson: I spent all of high school working on comics so that one day I would make it as a cartoonist and then do a comic about high school."
Though Andy finds much he'd like to change about that time in his life, he struggles to actively change past events, a lesson Robinson said he may have subconsciously inserted. "Learning from the past is definitely the better option, since wishing things were different doesn't really work so well," he said. "I think it was a matter of examining my own past and asking, 'What was I doing wrong and am I still doing it? Why am I still making the same mistakes?' You can also ask what unresolved issues you might have that are keeping you from change. This all sounds very personal growthy, so I hope the story is more entertaining."
Much of that entertainment comes in the form of one of Robinson's hallmarks, a heavy dose of pop culture reference. But instead of overloading Too Cool with cliches (like all the other '80s nostalgia-fueled entertainment), Robinson uses little details to craft the setting—clothing, hair cuts and phrases. "I did have to use a lot of reference, especially since I had it set specifically during 1985," Robinson said. "Your memory tends to blend 'the '80s' as one big lump, but I was trying to be careful not to include any anachronisms. It wasn't that hard, actually, since most of what I think of as the '80s was pretty much done by 1987, and everything after that seems more like a preview of the 1990s, at least in terms of pop culture. I think that's probably because I graduated from high school in '87, so it's a natural marker for me."
Though Too Cool bears some similarities to Robinson's previous books, it also differs significantly in how personal the subject matter is. Beyond time travel, the story becomes about Andy reconciling with the lasting pain of his relationship with his father. "It was definitely the hardest book to do," Robinson said. "Between the high school stuff and the family stuff, it was a very personal book."
The book also differs simply in size. Box Office Poison and Tricked are massive tomes, while Too Cool checks in at a relatively svelte 125 pages. "My intention was to have it be about 150 to 200 pages, but it came out much shorter than I expected," Robinson said. "I think there are a few reasons for this: for one thing, there's really only one main character, Andy, and he's in every single scene, which is different from my other books, which tend to have big ensemble casts. This really limited what I could do in terms of subplots and the development of the supporting cast. It was a real challenge."
So what would Robinson want to handle differently if he could time travel back to 1985? "Girls. I was pretty hopeless," he said. "I pretty much only had two... well, encounters is too serious a word, but I really can't think of another word. A girl asked me out, but I wasn't really interested in her and was a total jerk about it. Then I asked a different girl to the senior prom and she said no. That was it! Pathetic!"
