When I was a kid, I had no patience for “old stuff.” What that meant could vary but one example would be the (now defunct) concept of Saturday morning when all the cartoon blocks would play on the television. Somewhere around 11am the cartoons stopped and gave over to live-action syndicated ’70s dramas like Emergency! or Adam 12 and that was a hard stop for me. TV went off, sometimes grudgingly, and I had to find something else to do. If someone had pointed out the flaw in my logic that I would fiendishly devour episodes of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? despite it predating both of those shows I would have stared at them blankly. Cartoon is not for old. Cartoon is young.

Here I am at the half-century mark and still watching cartoons, and still not really motivated to give Emergency! and Adam 12 a go. For one thing it’s not like there’s ever been a lapse in medical dramas and police procedurals in the decades since so I might as well watch something in the genre that’s floated to the top, right? The 10% of “not crap?”

Opinions can vary of course, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to take a broader view of things and not outright dismiss entire genres or time-periods of entertainment. Not everything old is bad, and not everything old is good. What’s often true is that the merely mediocre fades away to leave only the memorable, and if you’re not careful about parsing that phenomenon you’ll end up in that all-too-common refrain of “music nowadays sucks” and similar blanket statements. Or the opposite end where “the youth” dismiss anything older than their own lifetimes as worthless and outdated and think every show tune originated with Family Guy. Then the older folk smugly assert “um, actually…” and the generational divide gets another fracture.

In terms of comics, there’s stuff from over 100 years ago that deserves study just as much as there’s stuff being produced now that’s worth a look, even if your jaded eye detects the influences of the past upon the present. 90% of everything is still crap, but just don’t make the mistake of cutting that last 10% out of your life.