Author: Andrew Wheeler

We’ve all occasionally wanted to go back in time — to fix something we screwed up the first time, to relive some particular time in our lives, or just to do something differently. But would we be able to do better the second time around? Alex Robinson’s new graphic novel — coming up in July from Top Shelf — asks exactly those questions.

Too Cool To Be Forgotten
By Alex Robinson
Top Shelf, July 2008, $14,95

In 2010, Andy Wicks is coming up on his fortieth birthday — he’s married with two daughters and working as a computer technician. And, to finally stop smoking, he agrees to his wife’s suggestion to get himself hypnotized.

He closes his eyes, listens to the doctor…and wakes up in his 15-year-old body, back in 1985. He soon decides that some kind of hypnotic construct — though he never internalizes that thought, or really acts as if it’s true — and that the whole scenario is designed to make him decide not to have his first cigarette, and thus stop smoking back up in his own time.

Now, I am a former science fiction editor, so I probably think about this stuff more than most people, but Andy never seems to really think through his situation, or quite decide how old he is. He never really thinks of himself as a 15-year-old; his self-image stays solidly middle-aged. But he also doesn’t think through the consequences of that — he thinks of other high-school students, who are exactly the same age he is, as “kids.”

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Lemire is in the middle of an impressive thematically-related trilogy of stories about a rural bit of Ontario, Canada – the first book was Tales from the Farm, in early 2007, and the third, [[[The Country Nurse]]], will be along in October of this year. [[[Ghost Stories]]] is the middle book, but it’s a completely independent story – you don’t need to know anything about Tales to read it.

Ghost Stories: Essex County, Vol. 2
By Jeff Lemire
Top Shelf, September 2007, $14.95

Lou Lebeuf is an old, alcoholic, deaf man, living alone on the farm that was his younger brother’s and their father’s before him. He’s also either going senile or just doesn’t care about his current life – and who would? there’s not much to it – so he ignores his new home-care nurse and instead wanders through the memories of his younger days. At first he remembers growing up on that farm, playing hockey with his younger, bigger brother Vince, but he soon moves into the main plot of Ghost Stories.

Lou came up to Toronto to play semi-pro hockey for the Grizzlies around 1950, and Vince followed him up in 1951 — Lou was a solid, smart player, but Vince was a giant bull of a man, dominating the ice once he got angry enough. But, unfortunately for both of them, accompanying Vince on that trip in 1951 was his fiancee, Beth Morgan. Lou was strongly attracted to Beth, and, once — the night after the Grizzlies made the playoffs that March — Lou and Beth had quick, secret sex on a rooftop.

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Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
By James Sturm & Rich Tommaso
Jump at the Sun/Hyperion, 2007, $16.99

This is a profoundly worthy book — produced under the asupices of The Center for Cartoon Studies, by two respected, serious modern cartoonists, published by the premier imprint for African-American children’s books, and about possibly the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball. Luckily, it’s not as dry and dull as that might make it sound.

It’s not really a biography of the great pitcher [[[Satchel Paige]]], though it looks like one — it follows the life and very abbreviated Negro Leagues baseball career of an Alabama man named Emmet. (His last name isn’t revealed.) Emmet faced Paige in one of his first at-bats for the Memphis Red Sox, but broke his leg in stealing home — he made the run, but lost his career. Emmet’s life intersects Paige’s again, much later, but he also follows Paige’s career, and compares it to his wn life along the way.

Satchel Paige opens with Emmet’s fateful at-bat against Paige, and then moves on from there, with a few vignettes of Emmet’s life from the late twenties to the early forties. Emmet’s a sharecropper, a poor man in a poor part of the world, and moderately oppressed by the local white landowners. (His son is beaten once, and we see the aftermath of one lynching, but Emmet himself kowtows enough to keep himself and his family safe. Perhaps the correct word for his condition is “terrorized.”) The book makes it clear that those white landowners own everything — at one point Emmet thinks “walkin’ out your door is trespassing if they choose to call it that.”

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