The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics by Bill Blackbeard

Cartoonists like Winsor McCay and Frank King were immensely popular in their heyday but they worked in a notoriously fleeting medium, the newspaper page, and once their work stopped being published they were relegated to the dusty corner of the cultural consciousness reserved for trivia questions (“Who created Gasoline Alley?”). If I had to sum up the achievement of the late Bill Blackbeard in one sentence, I would say that he was the man who gave comics its memory. This was followed by a memorial, “Bill Blackbeard R.I.P.” by Jeet Heer, here: But long before he died, Blackbeard knew he would live on in scores of books that reprint American newspaper comic strips, all compiled from his monumental collection. On March 10, only a few weeks shy of his 85 th birthday, Blackbeard died in California at Country Villa Watsonville East Nursing Home where he had been living for some time. Harvey titled “Bill Blackbeard, The Man Who Saved Comics, Dead at 84.” He writes:īill Blackbeard, without question or quibble, is the only absolutely indispensable figure in the history of comics scholarship for the last quarter century-and will undoubtedly retain the title for well into this century and beyond. The news was announced in The Comics Journal in an obituary by R.C. His death is an occasion to celebrate his life, and not just in the comics community.

Blackbeard was a dedicated keeper of the comics, who devoted his life to preserving them and raising their cultural visibility.

The other day Art Spiegelman called, saddened and surprised that Bill Blackbeard, founder of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art (SFACA), had died in early March, and “nobody has heard about it until now.” His wife apparently did not inform anyone of the passing for a month.

The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics by Bill Blackbeard