Few in the comics field would disagree that we're living in the Golden Age of Comic-Strip Reprints: 21st century readers can easily find complete collections of classic series such as Peanuts, Terry and the Pirates, Dick Tracy and Gasoline Alley on their bookstore shelves. But this would not be possible without Bill Blackbeard, b. 1926: his contributions to the medium include his dogged preservation of early 20th century newspapers and his seminal book The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics.

*Full Disclosure: My employer, Fantagraphics Books, has worked with Bill Blackbeard for many years on many reprint projects. Also, Fantagraphics' co-owner Kim Thompson leant his technical knowledge to this article. (However, my interest in Bill Blackbeard's work predates my career, stemming from when I was 10 years old and read TSCoNC at my friend Chantal Stendardo's house several times over.)

Blackbeard's comic-strip obsession is life-long: he "learned how to read from the comics." He recalled that, as a child, he would "locate as many classic comic-strip episodes as possible. And of course, the only source when I was a kid […] was the garages and storage areas of my neighbors who had, in several cases, put aside newspapers and Sunday comics […]. When I was young, of course, I would go over there and read them for their comic strips."

Although he continued to collect comic strips, he also had other pursuits in early adulthood: according to Nicholson Baker in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Blackbeard served in World War II and wrote for Weird Tales. But in 1967, Blackbeard's archival efforts began in earnest when he discovered that, in their switch to microfilm, libraries were getting rid of the hard copies of the materials: even such institutions as the Library of Congress were doing so. In a personal interview, Blackbeard said "I thought the obvious solution is to become a university, or at least the equivalent of one: a non-profit organization. In the case of most universities, they could not dispose of any of their reference material, being a non-profit organization: any of their reference material from books to recordings to paintings to magazines to newspapers. All they could do is pass it on to another institution. So I became that other institution.

"That had me in fairly short order, within a year or so, taking trucks from coast to coast, from Chicago to Washington D. C. to New Orleans, to Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, everywhere there were newspapers up for discard. So I quickly filled this big house […] in the Sunset District of San Francisco, which became the locus of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, and made all this stuff available for direct research for people that wanted to see the actual material, the actual comics, rather than having to strain their eyes over microfilm. So that was basically the source, the reason that the Academy came into existence."

Of course, there was more at stake than squinting scholars: reproductions from microfilm are much poorer than those directly from the newspapers. Kim Thompson explained: "because microfilm is very tiny, the resolution is very low — good enough for researchers to read articles, probably good enough to reproduce art where sharpness is not crucial (or if the art is being reproduced really small), but bad for comic strips and work of an archival/artistic nature.

Also, microfilm is black and white, so on color Sundays that are being reproduced in color you're screwed, and on color Sundays that are being reproduced only for line you're sort of screwed anyway because the colors (especially the red) reproduce as gray or even black and it's near impossible to remove, whereas with a color scan someone like Paul [Baresh, who's in charge of scanning at Fantagraphics] can get rid of the colors through some digital tweaking."

Over the decades, however, the collection became too large for Blackbeard to handle by himself: if Wikipedia is accurate, it amounted to "some 75 tons of material." Eventually, the Ohio State University made an attractive financial offer on the archives because, Blackbeard said, they "wanted it in a more reserved, more accessible home," and he accepted, retiring to Santa Cruz. Now in his 80s, it's not a decision that Blackbeard regrets: "The collection is very beautifully housed and documented and made accessible by a very helpful and knowledgeable staff, so I was very happy with it."

Blackbeard's favorite strips, in particular, have became the basis for Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates (published by IDW), Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs/Captain Easy, published as Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy by NBM, and George Herriman's Krazy Kat, published by Eclipse, Kitchen Sink and then (as Krazy & Ignatz) by Fantagraphics.

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