If you know more than a few millennials, you probably know someone who reveres Calvin and Hobbes as a sacred work of art. That comic strip’s cultural impact is even more remarkable considering that it ran in newspapers for only a decade, from 1985 to 1995: barely an existence at all, by the standards of the American funny pages, where the likes of Garfield has been lazily cracking wise for 45 years now. Yet these two examples of the comic-strip form could hardly be more different from each other in not just their duration, but also how they manifest in the world. While Garfield has long been a marketing juggernaut, Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson has famously turned down all licensing inquiries.

In 2011, half of young people in England and Wales had moved out at age 21. In 2021, that age was 24, and I can only imagine that age will have gone up again the next time the stats are compiled. Staying with parents for a while in adulthood isn’t new, but the steadily increasing permanence of it is. At least 620,000 more adults were living with their parents as “grown-up children” in 2021 compared with a decade earlier, a rise of 13.6% – and 22,000 of that new cohort were 35 years old.

The Opies went on, “And through these quaint ready-made formulas the ridiculousness of life is underlined, the absurdity of the adult world and their teachers proclaimed, danger and death mocked, and the curiosity of language itself is savoured.”

The ridiculousness and pointlessness of “67” is perhaps why it has succeeded so extravagantly as a meme, breaking out of the classroom to become Word of the Year: it perfectly encapsulates everything the Opies understood that kids need out of their private jokes.

One intrigued Flakall worker by the name of Edward Wilson pocketed some of these corn puffs, took them home, seasoned them with salt and cheese, and sampled them. Needless to say, the experiment was a success, to the point where the company turned away from animal feed production completely to produce what Wilson had called Korn Kurls.