Bill Blackbeard: The Collector Who Rescued the Comics

In early January of 1998, a team of movers arrived at 2850 Ulloa Street in the quiet residential neighborhood known as the Sunset District of San Francisco (Figure 1). Inside, they discovered that the unassuming Spanish stucco home was literally filled from top to bottom with paper material of all shapes and sizes- books, magazines, comic books, pulps, story papers, prints, drawings, and, most importantly, newspapers- bound newspapers, individual newspapers, newspaper tear sheets, and newspaper clippings. The massive collection filled most of the upstairs rooms and the entire spacious, ground-floor garage below that ran the length of the building. The immense garage was a maze of narrow alleys created by floor-to-ceiling stacks of bound newspaper volumes and individual tear sheets, boxes and file cabinets containing millions of comic strip clippings; and rows of shelves made from crates turned on their sides to house books and periodicals (Figures 2-4). For decades, the building also served as the residence of the man responsible for collecting this mass of paper, Bill Blackbeard (Figure 5). Blackbeard was living there with his wife, Barbara, and more than seventy-five tons of popular culture material, when he learned in 1997 that the home's owner would not renew his lease. Recognizing that the collection, known as the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art (SFACA), would have to be moved, Blackbeard began negotiations with Lucy Shelton Caswell, curator of The Ohio State University Cartoon Library & Museum (then called the Cartoon Research Library). Caswell and Blackbeard eventually agreed that the materials should be transferred to Ohio State. The movers faced the daunting task of packing the entire collection to be shipped across the country to its new home. It was by far the largest collection ever acquired by the library and is one of its most important for the study of popular culture in general and graphic narrative- or sequential art- in particular. Blackbeard's story demonstrates that individual collectors have played a particularly critical role in protecting and preserving our popular culture heritage, a heritage that, until relatively recently, was largely ignored by established academic institutions. Born April 28, 1926, Bill Blackbeard spent his early childhood in Lawrence, Indiana, a rural town located northeast of Indianapolis. His grandfather operated a service station and his father, Sydney, was an electrician. His mother Thelma handled the bookkeeping side of her husband's business. When he was eight or nine, he moved to Newport Beach, California.2 The high point of the week for young Blackbeard was the arrival of the Sunday comics. At some point in his youth, he made the happy discovery that- in the days before recycling- many people accumulated stacks of newspapers in their basements and ga- rages, sometimes to use as wrapping or scrap paper or sometimes because they just did not get around to disposing of them. During an interview conducted in 2007, Blackbeard reminisced, "Once I discovered this, I had no other interest in life than finding these caches of newspapers" (Personal interview). He mined the piles he located for their comic pages, which he eagerly read and began to keep in stacks. He later recalled, "I wasn't old enough then to have a good librarian's sense of order. I just sort of thought they were all wonderful and I kept the stacks going" (Personal interview). His mother did not allow him much space to keep his collection, so he limited himself to daily comic pages and Sunday sections from one or two newspapers. Blackbeard did not inherit his collecting obsession nor his interest in comics from his parents. When asked if either of them collected, he replied "Oh no, Fm afraid they were pretty much the typical fine people of their time. No, there was no interest along that line at all. I don't think my Dad ever read the comics . . . No, there was nothing apparent in the family background, going back to my grandparents that would have indicated [collecting]. …