OK, enough about D-Day. Today’s “old” comic strip is from this past September, and in color at that. From the time I became a comic strip creator, I have sensed there is a trap in characters that never age. People in general tend to establish careers and families as young adults, and that includes comic strip authors. Like other writers, cartoonists write what they know. For these reasons, there has always been an abundance of comic strips about young families and children, and there have always been 70-year-old cartoonists still drawing comic strips about babies in diapers. It’s not entirely their fault. More than patrons of any other medium, readers of newspaper comics seem to expect the same thing on a daily basis. Not all of them, but enough of them that one cannot blame a working cartoonist for doing what it takes to bring home the bacon. Some comic strip authors sense this trap and try to avoid it by allowing characters to age in something like natural time. That has its own traps. We’ll talk more about this tomorrow.