When I was this kid’s age, shortly after I came home from school (after walking barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways, even in the summer), the afternoon paper showed up containing about a dozen comics. All second- or third-tier comics, because I lived just outside of New York City and the City papers between them had exclusive regional rights to everything worth reading. Our top strip was, I think, Tiger. Once a week, in the Sunday News, I’d get to see comics the rest of the world had heard of.

Peanuts? B.C.? A few times a year when I went into the City with my father and we picked up the New York Post. And during the summer, when we stayed in an area where an out-of-town edition of the Post was delivered.

So even if the newspapers from his grandfather’s childhood contained more comics strips than they do now — which might or might not be the case (and assuming the kid actually reads newspapers) — this is the Golden Age for “number of comic strips”: 8-year-old me literally had no access to Dick Tracy during the week, while he can choose among hundreds if not thousands of comic strips on a daily basis.

EDITED TO ADD: Come to think of it, “And before we knew it, that was all” needs the CIDU tag.