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Aging With Calvin and Hobbes: The Platypus Reads CCLXV

Doing the math the other night, I realized that I am older than Calvin's parents as they appear in the strip.  That's odd: realizing that I have an edge on the immutable authorities of Calvin and Hobbes' world.  It's not that I haven't realized I'm aging or anything.  In grad school I noticed that I was starting to look quite a bit like Calvin's father.  Now I'm older.  I have a beard and all my hair is gone.  That's the thing about art: we age but it remains the same.  Achilles will always be young and powerful, but we won't, and therein lies an opportunity.  Art freezes time so that we who are moving in time can continue to look at the frozen moment.  The art doesn't change, but each change in us offers the opportunity to reengage with the work and draw fresh insights from it.

Bill Watterson said that the world of a comic like Calvin and Hobbes is very fragile.  I think I'm beginning to see what he meant.
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