Too cool to be forgotten.

- Too cool to be forgotten. Alex Robinson. Middle-aged Andy has been trying to quit smoking. He’s tried everything, from conventional to non-conventional means. So why not give hypnosis a try? Yet he never expected to seemingly travel back in time and revive his high school years. Is this a chance for a do-over? To ask out the girl he never dared to talk to? To avoid that first cigarette? To reach out to the people he ignored back then? Perhaps. Or perhaps, it’s a journey meant to confront Andy with that one memory he kept blocking out, the root of so much grief…

Notable character drama disguised as a time travel adventure. What at first would seem to be yet another nostalgia yarn (The 80’s! Being a teenager again, with all the drama and excitement!) soon turns into a meditation on the way our memories shape us. 

I remember reading a review of this comic years ago, in which the reviewer felt that Andy’s final memory was something he surely wasn’t likely to forget. I would say I disagree with this interpretation…

MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD. 

…because despite what the title tells us, it’s not something that Andy had forgotten, it’s something he had been trying to block. In the summer of 1985, Andy didn’t just have his first cigarette. He lost his father to Lou Gehrig disease. There are tons of hints throughout the book that this is what he’s supposed to confront and that Andy is avoiding it on purpose. Several characters alude to his father or to “the situation at home”, and every time Andy gets lost in thoughts and refuses to acknowledge the mention. He cries while looking at a family picture —talking about his siblings, his mother and the dog, but completely avoiding mentioning his father. At one point he mispronounces “I did what I had to do” as “I Dad what I had to do” (the editor makes sure to point out this was entirely intentional and not a misprint). 

So what is going on here isn’t that Andy had forgotten his father nor that it was his death that lead him to chain-smoke, it’s that it was a memory he had buried so deep he had to tear down several defenses before he got to that point. 

What follows, then, is a tour-de-force scene that is not just a final talk between father and son, but a confrontation between past and future. In order for Andy to have a future, he would have to first accept the past. 

All in all, an interesting little comic that is not what it seems at first. More than worth a look.