Bill Blackbeard
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bill Blackbeard is a writer-editor and the founder-director of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, a comprehensive collection of comic strips and cartoon art from American newspapers. This major collection, consisting of 2.5 million clippings, tearsheets and comic sections, spanning the years 1894 to 1996, has provided source material for books and articles by Blackbeard and other researchers.
Blackbeard was born April 28, 1926, in Lawrence, Indiana. After high school in Newport Beach, California, he served during World War II in the 89th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squad, 9th Army, in France, Belgium and Germany. He attended Fullerton College on the GI Bill, studying English and American literature. As a freelance writer, he wrote, edited or contributed to more than 200 books on cartoons and comic strips, including the Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, 100 Years of Comic Strips, Eclipse's and Fantagraphics' Krazy & Ignatz series and NBM's 18-volume Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy.
Finding that libraries were discarding bound newspapers after microfilming, he established the SFACA in 1968 as a non-profit organization and began collecting newspapers from California libraries, expanding his scope to institutions nationwide. Following three decades of acquisition, accumulating some 75 tons of material, he turned the SFACA Collection over to Ohio State University's Cartoon Research Library, where it is available for research. After he sold the collection to Ohio State in 1997, Blackbeard moved from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, California.
It was Blackbeard who told Nicholson Baker about "fraudulent" studies used by libraries to justify their massive destruction of books and newspapers, information documented by Baker in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001), a National Book Critics Circle Award Winner. Baker devotes the preface of this book to his discussions with Blackbeard.
Blackbeard's efforts to preserve comic strips in complete runs and publish the work of notable comic artists made him a 2004 Eisner Hall of Fame finalist.
