Treasures of Comic Art – CBS Sunday Morning on the Bill Blackbeard Collection
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One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. And for the late Bill Blackbeard, the treasure that he’d stored from floor to ceiling in his San Francisco home was maybe the largest, most comprehensive private collection of American newspaper comics ever assembled.
“He was single-minded,” said Caitlin McGurk, curator of comics and cartoon art at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University. “He felt a calling to preserve this type of material that no one else really cared about. I mean, comic art is kind of an underdog of the art world.”
The library is currently displaying just a sample of the trove of cartoons (some 2.5 million pieces in all, dating as far back to 1893) that Blackbeard amassed over 30 years of collecting. The exhibit is called “Man Saves Comics.”
If you missed the CBS Sunday Morning segment on Bill Blackbeard collection and the efforts to preserve it at The Billy Ireland CBS has the video and an illustrated transcript posted now. With a special appearance by Jenny Robb!
There were, of course, libraries that were converting their collections of old newspapers onto microfilm, but microfilm is black-and-white, and that meant the rich colors of the Sunday comics would be lost to history.
And microfilm was fragile: “It gets covered in scratches, and just after a few uses by patrons can be rendered unusable,” said McGurk.
Which is where Blackbeard stepped in…
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