Alex Robinson is "Too Cool to be Forgotten"

[CBR News]

"Box Office Poison" creator Alex Robinson returns with "Too Cool to be Forgotten," a time warp to the 1980s courtesy of Top Shelf. CBR News spoke with Robinson about the graphic novel and got a 10 page preview.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?p...ticle&id=16538

[Chintzy Beatnik]

Sweet.

I love Alex Robinson.

[Ryan K]

I'm looking forward to this. I was quite dissapointed by Robinson's Lower Regions, but Tricked and Box Office Poison were wonderful.

[noh-varr]

I have the preview book of this I got from Robinson at Heroescon two years ago, been looking forward to it ever since. Though really anything he works on I'm picking up.

[stealthwise]

Am I hard?

I just might be.

[Ryan K]

I spotted this in Borders a couple days ago, I hadn't realized it was out yet.


It's a fun book. I'm sure everybody wishes they could go back to when they were in high school for a couple days and fix a couple regrets, so that's fairly enjoyable. But overall I was really dissapointed.

Robinson's artistic style hasn't really progressed at all in all the years since Box Office Poison. In fact I think it may have actually gotten a tad worse. His characters seem stiff, most look quite a bit a lot, and there's really not much variation in the compositions from panel to panel.

There's a lot of talking heads in the book. Actually one head. Not even talking really. There's a lot of a thinking head. Which gets pretty boring after awhile. Especially because at some point one gets the impressions this is just Robinson's way of working through a lot of his own personal high school issues through the character. Maybe that's off base, but that's how it came across to me.

And the ending is a real letdown. Well, the last 20-30 pages actually. It just felt . . . cliched. More than the rest of the book even. Nothing really stands out. If you sat 100 mediocre writers in a room and told them to write a story with the basic premise that a man somehow goes back in time and relives his not-great high school days, I'd bet 85% would crack out this exact same book (well actually most of them would toss in a scene where the protaginsit finally gets the best of (or punches) a bully. So maybe I should give him credit for omitting that.

Maybe I'm being to hard on Robinson. After all Box Office Poison along with a small stack of others was one of the first "alternative" comics I read. Since reading it (I'm not going to go so far as to say "because of reading it") I've devoured a ton of alternative comics and they now make up the bulk of my comics reading. Maybe I place BOP too high because of where I read it in the timeline of my development as a reader. Maybe I shouldn't have expected too much of Robinson. But I read Tricked years later, and loved that.

I will say there's a 2 page spread towards the end that I stared at for 5-10 minutes. People who've read it will know which one I mean. Beautiful work. But as a whole I feel the book was predictable, a bit by the numbers, technically sound but safe, a touch to sappy and sentimental for my (personal) tastes, and easily not as good as Tricked or Box Office Poison.