Not Allowed To Grow Up / Comic Strips

• This trope is especially common in newspaper comic strips. Peanuts and The Family Circus are the most egregious offenders, but the effect can become even more jarring in instances such as Sally Forth, where events continually occur that become part of the characters' canon history and define what is and is not possible for the continuing present, and yet the time needed for these events to have transpired has no impact on young Hilary's age. Quite the contrary, sometimes she even seems to be growing younger.
  • Sally Forth's writer has given them occasional bouts of Genre Savvy self-awareness on this point. A story arc in early 2015 shows Hilary and her friends as twenty-somethings, and oddly, all the adults still look the same.
  • In the case of Peanuts, Linus miraculously nearly catches up to Lucy in age, nor is Rerun far behind; ditto with Sally and Charlie Brown.
  • Lucy herself, when she first appeared, was much younger than the other characters and was shown wearing footed sleepers and sleeping in a crib. Similarly, when Schroeder made his debut, the joke was not simply "playing Beethoven on his toy piano" but "a baby playing Beethoven on his toy piano".
• FoxTrot uses this trope where the kids in the family still attend the same schools for the same amount of time for years since the first comic. Even though Peter and Paige sometimes plan what they want to do for college, they never actually get there.
  • And every year Paige has to deal with the stress of starting high school. That's pretty much awful.
  • A combined Lampshade Hanging and Shout-Out during a more serious storyline has Jason wondering if he'd suddenly stepped into For Better or for Worse. His mother responds that she doesn't mind if he remains ten years old.
  • When StarCraft II came out, Jason stated that he spent 11 years waiting for the game. He claimed the missing year was "waiting in the womb".
  • A strip had Jason refusing to acknowledge the new year because, as Roger pointed out, "you really don't want to turn eleven". Jason says this is because Peter said he was eleven when he started liking girls.
• Historically averted in Gasoline Alley, which was the first comic strip to allow its characters to age in Real Time. Skeezix was a foundling infant in 1921 and a centenarian in 2021. Several characters quietly died of old age at various times, although improbably ripe old ages are somewhat common among the mains, such as Skeezix's adoptive mother and father dying at 105 and still living at 121, respectively.
• Averted in For Better or for Worse, which ages its characters in Real Time. Characters who were babies and children early in the strip were teens and married young adults 15 years later.
  • Ironically, in 2007 creator Lynn Johnston announced her intent to semi-retire by resolving most of the ongoing storylines, narrowing the strip's focus to the family of then-grown oldest child Michael and "freezing" everyone's ages, essentially returning the strip to the format it began with. In the end, she went with the Continuity Reboot route of restarting the strip's story from the beginning, updating art and references when needed, with a few occasional new strips thrown in.
  • Maintaining a realistic connection to time forced Johnston to make the heartbreaking decision to kill the beloved family dog, Farley, since realistically his breed would not last much longer than (at the time) he already had. Friends and family tried to talk her out of it. Fans who caught wind of it got up in arms. Charles Schulz, creator of Peanuts, is said to have told her that if she killed Farley, he would have Snoopy hit by a truck. But at least one friend managed to persuade her that he had to go out a hero, and Johnston wrote a storyline in which he dies saving April's life.
• The main characters of the Malaysian Slice of Life school comedy, Lawak Kampus, never seem to age ever since their debut in 2004, having been 14 throughout the years. Actually lampshaded in-universe in one of their stories, where the characters had a conversation regarding the Harry Potter movies, saying how the titular character went from cute in 2001 to handsome in 2011 - and then asking, "why haven't we changed at all?"
• Brooke McEldowney's 9 Chickweed Lane quasi-averts this trope. McEldowney's characters specifically mention their own ages at times, leave high school, move to New York, quit jobs, buy a farm, etc. Though they are in motion and acknowledge the passing of years, they seem largely unaffected by that passage. For example, Edda's mother (who has to be around 60 by now) is still smokin' hot and Edda's grandmother shows no signs of infirmity.
• Doonesbury started off embracing this trope but after Trudeau's mid-1980s hiatus it began half-heartedly averting it. Most of the original characters are supposed to be in their fifties or older, although they don't look it. Younger characters, though — particularly Alex, Jeff, and Zipper — have been aging more or less in real time and have of late entered or even graduated from college. And in a case that spans both eras, Mike's second wife Kim started out in the 1970s strips as the adopted Vietnamese orphan who could only speak English in advertising slogans.
  • Note also that this trope doesn't seem to apply to every character. Uncle Duke has been in his late 40s since the mid-1970s, even as every other character has aged around him. No one seems to have noticed.
  • Given Duke's proclivities it's possible that he's accidentally and unknowingly stumbled upon a true anti-aging formula.
  • It hasn't been at all clear since the late '70s that Duke actually exists in the same continuity as the other characters. If it wasn't for the occasional brief visit from Zonker (his nephew) or Zeke (his ex-employee), he would never intersect with the rest of The 'Verse.
• Funky Winkerbean kept its characters in high school for two decades before Tom Batiuk decided to employ a Time Skip to move them to post-collegiate age. More recently, another Time Skip has moved the original characters to middle age. These changes have accompanied a change in the strip's tone from gag-a-day humor to dramatic arcs.
• Lampshaded by the above quote in Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin notably remains six years old throughout the strip's ten-year runtime, despite experiencing several distinct Christmases, summer vacations, and other time-specific milestones.
  • Many fan works explore Calvin's later life. Most of the best ones (that is to say, a number of the actually funny ones) accept that whatever Hobbes' nature relative to the various realities of Calvin and those around him is, it hasn't changed since Calvin was six, and for the most part neither has Hobbes.
  • One popular theory is that the comic strip Frazz is what Calvin became when he grew up. The other involves Fight Club.
• Nancy in all its incarnations (starting back when the comic was called 'Fritzi Ritz') has been 8 years old since 1933! This makes Dagwood look like he has progeria.
• Dennis the Menace has had a sixth birthday — before returning to age 5.5 the next day — many times. Like children in The Family Circus and Peanuts, he has remained the same age. It has gone on so long that in the early 1990s, a rumor began on the Internet that the Dennis of the 1950s/1960s had grown up to become the inspiration for the dad in Calvin and Hobbes. Also like the others, Dennis has changed with the times, to where the family entered the computer age and got other new gadgets when they came out. However, his love of Westerns, which seemed oddly out of place in the 1970s and 1980s, can now be explained by cable TV.
  • The late '50s live-action TV series ran into this problem toward the end of its run.
  • The UK Dennis the Menace (from the Beano comic) subverted this in one issue in 2001 where Dennis was celebrating his 50th birthday (the 50th anniversary of his first appearance in the Beano comic), while the character still remained physically 10.
    • Dennis' sister Bea grew to the age of about 1 and got her own spin-off comic. Dennis didn't age though.
• Both kept and subverted in the strip Blondie (1930). Blondie and Dagwood have not aged significantly since their first appearance in 1930, 82 years ago. (If real aging were used, they'd both be hitting their century mark.) But they've had kids who have matured to college age — then stayed there. Daisy the Dog's puppies are perpetually half-grown and have been for decades. The characters have evolved, though, as have the storylines. The original strip was about the relationship between the upper-class heir-to-millions Dagwood and the lower-class party-girl Blondie, with lots of Roaring Twenties-era class-conscious humor. Now it's about two working parents in the suburbs and their life. At some point, another "growth spurt" may hit and they might be grandparents — but Blondie will still have her 1930-style hairdo.
• Zbeng! is an Israeli newspaper comic about a high school class — the same characters since 1987. And of course, it's always about the present day.
• Little Orphan Annie seems never to age beyond about eleven. In a 1941 strip, Daddy Warbucks recalls events from a 1931 story arc, saying, "I had Eonite ten years ago and lost it", and does not notice that his daughter has not aged significantly in those ten years.
• In Luann, the title character and her friends were approximately 15 years old when the strip began in 1985; in the ensuing quarter-century, they've advanced to roughly 18 or 19. Luann was probably actually closer to 13-14 in the beginning, as she and her friends were in junior high, while her older brother Brad was in high school. She and her friends have since moved on to high school, graduating in 2014 and moving on to college, while Brad became a fireman, so there's been some development, but it's still at a snail's pace. A straight example is Shannon, who has remained six years old despite the rest of the cast slowly getting older.
• Mark Trail used to be allowed to age, but is now caught in a time freeze so powerful that even he can't punch his way out of it. He even occasionally revisits old storylines, trapped in an eternal loop where everything is the same except where censored to match the values of the outside world.
• Perpetually-fifteen Jeremy of Zits was finally allowed to hit sixteen, fix his van, and get a driver's license a few years ago.
• In Dilbert, the title character has remained in his thirties or so for over twenty years. Wally is perpetually an older worker coasting to retirement.
• Garfield:
  • Garfield celebrates his birthday every year on June 19, the day the comic debuted. Sometimes, his actual age is mentioned and it's now more than double the average cat life expectancy. Indeed, at age 39, Garfield is now officially older than the oldest cat in Real Life. Odie has stayed pup for over 30 years. Also, Jon and Liz should be in late middle age by now.
  • The strip's No Fourth Wall and Medium Awareness may handwave this, as the characters have always known they were in a comic strip and thus may be aware they can't age unless required.
  • Nermal somewhat parodies this with various revelations, like that he's a midget, deliberately stunts his growth, and uses extensive anti-aging therapies.
• The Buckets has ping-ponged between playing this trope straight and averting it. Larry Bucket gives his age as around 36 in the 1990s, but advances to 42 in the 2000s; his wife Sarah made a similar age jump at the same time. Their two sons have aged at different rates; when the strip began in 1990, Toby was around 6 or 7, while Eddie was still in diapers, whereas by 2010 their ages were given as 15 for Toby and 6 for Eddie.^note  Strip creator Scott Stantis and his successor Greg Cravens have gone on record as saying that Toby and Eddie's variable age increases were for writing and comedy purposes. And Larry's father Frank has actually lost a few years, attending his fiftieth high school reunion in 1996 (making his age around 68) but being implied to be closer to 64 or 65 by 2010.
• Frazz: Despite having summer vacations, Caulfield always returns to third grade.
• In MAD's Gasoline Alley parody, despite the Skeezix-parody character aging rather rapidly between (or within) panels, another character remained an infant. The others aged at various (and usually nonsensical) rates. The Little Orphan Annie parody's Twist Ending specifically averts this.

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