Better to forgive quickly

People who keep up on comics took particular note in the past few days when it turned out the "Watterson-esque" panels, "drawn by a second-grader," some were beginning to speculate about in Stephan Pastis's "Pearls Before Swine" had been drawn by Bill Watterson himself. In seeing the confirmation, though, I did have to face how I was still conscious of being in a "grudge-holding mode" over how a recent strip had been meant to make a "joke" out of "prequel denial." A first attempt by someone else to lead off with a declaration of there being "three Star Wars movies," as if to bait the chance to ostentatiously deny there are any more, which they got straight to anyway, had already annoyed me when I'd seen it. However, in retrospect Pastis might have managed to add an interpretation of "prequel denial" being sort of pathetic; maybe I was just aggravated by this giving a chance for all the commentators on the official site I read the comic on to pitch in with their own contempt.

In any case, I'd already known of a few other recent instances where Bill Watterson has begun to say a few things beyond the implied "I said everything I intend to say in the work I completed." Nearly two decades of that implied statement haven't dimmed his legend, anyway, although I can be conscious of how I seem much more likely to take a volume of "The Complete Peanuts" off my bookshelf than to work one of the big volumes of my copy of "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes" out of its box. I'm also a little inclined to remember how I became interested in the comic strip "Frazz" in part because of an impression, commented on by others (even if some of them do that in a disdaining way), that its art has its own "Watterson-esque" feel.