Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Too Cool To Be Forgotten


A 38 year old computer programmer goes under hypnosis and goes back in time to when he was a kid in the 1980’s. We’ve seen this concept before; it was the plot of Back To The Future, and even a Twilight Zone episode. The idea of going back in time and trying to right all the wrongs has been used in many other books and movies, and often with zany results.

I won’t give the plot away, but I will say this; he goes back to 1987 when he was 17 years old, and slips right back into 80’s fashion and lingo. He doesn’t lead the kids in rebellion, as you might suspect. On the contrary, he goes back to being a teenager emotionally because that’s the position he’s in. He has serious thoughts on whether or not to stay back in time, maybe start off the dot-com boom, become an independent record producer and sign Kurt Cobain.

One of the reasons I loved this book so much was for the same reason we all loved Back To The Future. When kids see adult authority figures, they assume they were always adults. Ask any high school student, they’ll say they think that the teacher was always a bald middle aged math teacher. They’ll never guess that the teacher used to smoke pot and blast Van Halen on the radio of his parents’ car. They’ll never believe that their mom and dad were once teenagers.

Only Alex Robinson, author of Box Office Poison and Tricked could pull this off. His comics are all about Generation-X growing old and coming to terms with it.

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