Bill Blackbeard, founder of the San Francisco Academy of Cartoon Art, has passed away at the age of 84.
Born in Indiana in 1926, Blackbeard’s fascination with comics began after the discovery of a large collection of old newspapers in a neighbor’s garage. He acquired the bound copies of old newspapers kept by libraries following the wholesale change to microfilm in the latter half of the 20th century.
With the aid of his wife Barbara and a group of assistants, Blackbeard clipped, organized and stored around 350,000 Sunday strips and 2.5 million dailies at the San Francisco Academy of Cartoon Art, which he founded in 1968. The collection is now housed at Ohio State University.