Scroll-happy kids don’t know what they’ve lost 

If you want proof that time works differently in America, don’t look at physics. Look at the comics page, where the kids never get older.

In “Hi and Lois”, baby Trixie is still in diapers, staring thoughtfully at a sunbeam like a tiny philosopher. The Flagstons’ twins are locked in grade school. Over in “Blondie,” Dagwood’s kids, Alexander and Cookie, have been high-school age for so long that in the real world they’d be joking about their own retirement.

“The Family Circus” works the same way. Billy, Dolly, and Jeffy loop endlessly through the same backyard and the same innocent questions. “Nancy” is forever 8 years old, mischievous and baffling adults, while Sluggo stays the scruffy kid from the wrong side of the tracks.

You could add “Dennis the Menace,” “Peanuts,” and others to the “never age” file. The kids remain kids. The parents remain roughly 39. It’s as if the comics page has a zoning ordinance: no one past middle school allowed.

From a cartoonist’s standpoint, this makes perfect sense. The premise of many classic strips is “parents and little kids under one roof.” Let those kids age naturally, and before long the parents are empty-nesters, the dog has died, and you’re drawing punchlines about colonoscopies and Medicare. That might be accurate, but it’s not what most editors want between the crossword and the weather.

There’s also the practical problem that if Dennis the Menace grew into a teenager, “menace” would stop sounding cute and start sounding like a police report. If Trixie Flagston learned to talk and moved out of the crib, you’d lose the quietly funny baby-thoughts that make the strip work. If Alexander Bumstead turned 30, somebody would have to ask why he’s still living at home.

So, in one universe — call it Comics Universe A — time stands still. Homework is always due “tomorrow.” Peanut-butter sandwiches never go out of style. The same kids are underfoot every morning when we open the paper.

But in Comics Universe B, something stranger happens: the characters actually grow up.

In “Gasoline Alley”, which dates back more than a century, bachelor Walt Wallet found an abandoned baby, Skeezix, on his doorstep and adopted him. Skeezix didn’t stay a baby. He went to school, served in World War II, married, and had children and grandchildren. Today Skeezix is elderly and Walt is over 100. Readers have watched an entire family live out its life across a few panels a day.

Other strips have dabbled in real time too. In “For Better or For Worse,” the kids moved from grade school to college to parenthood while their parents aged into retirement. In “Doonesbury,” the campus radicals from the early 1970s now have thinning hair and adult children of their own. On the same comics page where some families never change, others are allowed to grow up and grow old in public.

There’s a generational twist here. Many of us who grew up racing to the funny pages now have grandchildren. We remember fighting siblings for the Sunday comics; our grandkids are fighting algorithms on their phones. Their “comics” arrive as memes, GIFs, and short videos that vanish with a swipe.

They can scroll through thousands of jokes in five minutes. What they’re less likely to experience is the slow daily ritual of seeing what Dennis broke today or what deep thought Trixie is having in her crib. They may know a thousand viral characters, but they don’t check in on the same handful of kids every morning for 20 or 30 years.

Those unmoving panels taught us something the scroll culture doesn’t: that some parts of childhood are worth lingering over. In a life of constant updates and disappearing messages, there’s something quietly radical about a kid who refuses to age, and about another kid — like Skeezix in “Gasoline Alley” or Michael Patterson in “For Better or For Worse” — who does.

For those of us who still turn pages instead of just refreshing feeds, there’s comfort in that contrast. We age. The kids in the comics mostly don’t. And on the rare occasions when they do, we’re reminded that growing up, in real life and on the funny pages, is still a pretty good story.

Stephen Mr. Flatow of Long Branch, formerly of West Orange, is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror,” now available in an expanded paperback edition on Amazon.com, and is the president of the Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi. He divides his time between Long Branch and Jerusalem.