Among the numerous childish things I failed to put away when I became a man were the comic pages in the Sunday newspaper. I still glance at them to see how many of my old friends are doing. And whenever I do, I invariably think back fondly to those long ago days when my sister and I would sit on the living room floor in the home where I grew up and fight over "the funnies."

"Gimme those," she would say as she snatched the section from Hearst’s long defunct Sunday Journal-American right out from under my nose.

"I’m not finished yet," I’d protest, taking them back.

"I want Krazy Kat," she’d say, starting to whimper, and my dad would tell me to stop picking on my little sister. There was no way an older brother could ever win an argument like that.

My sister and I have, of course, grown up and grown old since those days but somehow Olive Oil and Wimpy and all those other characters whose words float above their heads in balloons must have discovered the fountain of youth. They haven’t aged a day.

Consider "Blondie." I read recently that the strip made its first appearance on Sept. 8, 1930. I had my 8th birthday that month. I’m going to be 85 come this September, but Blondie and Dagwood haven’t hardly grown any older even though the same news item said they got married in 1933. Gosh, they’d have to be over 100 by now but their children are still teenagers.

Unfortunately, the people who ink in the characters and put the words in their balloons have never been able to discover the same key to immortality for themselves. "Chic" Young, Blondie’s creator, died in 1973 and his son Dean now produces Blondie’s continuing saga. "Peanuts" and its gang of endearing kids didn’t make its debut until the 1950s, but Charles Schulz, his creator, has also left us. However, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy will live on in the form of "Peanuts Classics", a daily repeat of the strip’s most memorable panels.

When I was growing up, back in those days before television, the daily comic strip was such an important factor in our lives that during a newspaper strike in the 1930s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York, "the Little Flower" as he was affectionately known because of his first name, made sure we didn’t miss anything by reading them over the radio. Each evening during the strike, LaGuardia, a funny looking man with a chubby, cherubic face, managed to get copies of the most popular strips from newspapers in other cities. Then he would share them with us over WOR.

"In the next panel," he would say in his high pitched voice with its raspy New York accent, "Little Orphan Annie comes into the room and Sandy looks up at her and says, ‘Arf.’" He claimed to be doing it for the children but everyone listened in.

Of course, if you ask, most people will deny that they read the comics. Readership studies, however, tell a different story. They indicate that more people today read the comics than the editorials in the same papers. Again, consider Blondie. According to King Features, which handles its syndication, it appears in more than 2,000 newspapers every day in over 50 countries and it is read by more than 250 million people.

So how do you explain the popularity and staying power of the newspaper comic strip? Maybe it’s just the appeal of watching people who never grow old in an attempt to recapture some of the innocence of our own childhood. Or could it be that, in an era where Hollywood and television continue to fill our screens with violence, sex, and obscenity the comics still appeal to many people not because they represent some "low-brow" form of entertainment, but rather because they reflect some of our better qualities. For example, comic strip characters never curse, except maybe for an occasional "&$#!" in that balloon over their head. Dennis the Menace may torment Mr. Wilson but he’s never really malicious; Dagwood and Blondie have stayed married and neither one of them, at least to my knowledge, has had an extra-martial affair. In fact, the Christian Science Monitor attributes Blondie’s continuing success to its portrayal of "traditional middle-class domesticity."

Maybe it will come as a shock to Hollywood, but apparently there are still people around – millions of them – who still believe in such values. Then again maybe it’s silly to try and take the funnies seriously. Perhaps some people read them because they can’t help themselves, because, like me, they have never fully grown up themselves. As Popeye says, "I am what I am and that’s all that I am."