residen...

t 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. This was followed by a memorial, "Bill Blackbeard R.I.P." by Jeet Heer, here: 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. 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?"). Largely thanks to Blackbeard's unparalleled work as a collector and archivist, McCay, King, and countless other cartoonists from the early 20th century aren't just answers to trivia questions, but rather are living forces in the comics world, with their major works in print and vibrantly influential on the best young cartoonists of the day. I met Blackbeard only once, when he came to speak at an annual symposium I had co-chaired at SVA, Modernism & Eclecticism: The History of Graphic Design. He was surprisingly shy onstage, but his passion was extreme. I recall getting in an argument with him over racial and ethnic stereotypes in comics (I was writing a book on the subject). He said they were indeed racist, but context is everything, and discussing stereotyping in relation to American history would fill volumes. Alas, I never finished mine. As Spiegelman and most anyone involved in comics will tell you, without Blackbeard, the so-called Savior of Paper, comics would be a trivial pursuit in pop culture. His "Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics" was the turning point in the study and popular appreciation of the form. He didn't just leave lots of comics in his collection, he left an invaluable historical record (currently residing at Ohio State University). For a significant article on Blackbeard's essential contribution see Jenny E. Robb's "Bill Blackbeard: The Collector Who Rescued The Comics" here. And here is an excerpt: For Blackbeard, collecting newspapers and comic strips became more than a hobby and more than a career; it became his way of life. He and his San Francisco Academy of Comic Art call to mind the words of Nikolai Aristides, who defined a collection as "an obsession organized'' and says of the collector,