Guide to the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection

San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection: Newspaper Comic Strips

Biography of the Collector

The San Francisco Academy of Comic Art (SFACA) Collection is the life work of author and collector Bill Blackbeard, whose goal was to establish a complete collection of cartoon art from American newspapers, beginning with the earliest examples. In addition, the SFACA collection grew to include popular periodicals, popular fiction, popular film, narrative art reference works, comic books and graphic novels, dime novels and story papers, Victorian cartoon-illustrated fiction, science fiction fanzines, British boys' papers and "penny dreadfuls," and the works of significant fiction writers, all of these reflecting Blackbeard's desire to amass a comprehensive collection of popular narrative. As this finding aid describes only the newspaper comics part of the SFACA collection, the following biography concentrates exclusively on Blackbeard's efforts in this area.

Bill Blackbeard was born in Lawrence, Indiana, on April 28, 1926, and grew up in Newport Beach, California. He began reading newspaper comic strips during the 1930s, an era that featured such accomplished artists as Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff, George Herriman, E. C. Segar, Cliff Sterrett, Chester Gould, and many others. He attended high school in Newport Beach and went to Fullerton College on the GI Bill. His military service was in the 89th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squad, 9th Army, in France, Belgium and Germany, during World War II. During high school and college, his main interests were in history and literature, particularly English and American literature. After college, Blackbeard began working as a freelance writer, publishing stories in serials such as Weird Tales. He has written, edited, or contributed work to more than 200 books, primarily on the subject of cartoon history and criticism.

During the 1960s, Blackbeard began to be interested in writing a history of the comic strip. He found, however, that there was no research center collecting complete runs of comic strips from American newspapers. Concurrently, he discovered that many public and university libraries were discarding older, bound newspapers after microfilming them. In order to acquire these materials, he established the SFACA as a non-profit organization in 1968. He began collecting newspapers from California libraries, then expanded his scope to institutions nationwide, including the Library of Congress.

For the next 30 years, Blackbeard continued to acquire newspapers, along with the other materials mentioned above. In 1997, he sold the SFACA collection to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at the Ohio State University, ensuring that the collection would be kept intact and remain available for research. The collection, 75 tons of material in all, was carried from California to Ohio in six moving vans. Blackbeard moved the SFACA to Santa Cruz, as a publicly accessible reference center. He continued to edit and publish comic strip collections, and to collect representations of popular narrative art until his passing in March 2011.

Scope and Contents

The Newspaper Comics section of the SFACA Collection consists of 2.5 million clippings, tearsheets, and comic sections from American newspapers, dating from 1893 to 1996. Materials in the collection include clipped comic strips, single comic pages, complete Sunday comic sections, and entire newspapers. The focus of the first two years of work on this collection, supported by grants from the Getty Foundation, the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the Charles D. Farber Memorial Foundation, has been to establish a chronological run of each comic feature, either by amassing a group of clippings, or by identifying each feature's location in the collection of Sunday comic sections.

The distinction between comic clippings and comic sections is significant. The collector's original intent was to establish a complete run, from beginning to end, of every comic feature to have appeared in an American newspaper. In most cases, this meant clipping examples of each feature from various newspapers, for two reasons. First, no single newspaper could have run every comic feature. Second, any given newspaper might print a feature for a certain length of time, and then drop it, either temporarily or permanently. Newspaper strikes and mail strikes could also interfere with the continuous run of a feature in a given publication.

However, some features were never clipped from the original comic sections in which they appeared. The collector recognized that many of the early comic sections, dating from the 1890s to the 1920s, were extremely rare, and should be kept intact. In addition to the comic art they contain, many feature elaborate headers, marginal illustrations, and illustrated advertisements, all forming part of the overall design of the publication. The archivist's division of the two formats into separate series is described below, under "Arrangement."

The goal of the SFACA project has been to present complete listings of comic strip holdings to interested researchers. To achieve an integrated presentation, a tabular format for Series I was designed in the form of spreadsheets, each representing one year and containing a month-and-date grid, created in Excel and presented on the Web in PDF. Researchers can use the spreadsheets, in PDF form, to ascertain whether the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum has holdings of a comic feature for particular dates. However, our collection is not comprehensive, but as time passes more material will be processed. In these spreadsheets, each cell value is a letter-and-number combination, which represent the item's physical location in the library, and is used by staff to retrieve materials.

Arrangement

Restrictions on Use

Reproduction of materials in the collection is subject to the restrictions of copyright law. For any materials not yet in the public domain, the researcher must obtain permission from the copyright holder.

Restrictions on Access

Some materials in the collection are not immediately accessible, because they require further processing before use.

Some articles and biographical pieces were transferred from the boxes in this collection to the library's biographical files.

Index Terms

This record series is indexed under the following controlled access subject terms.

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Preferred Citation

San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.

Acquisition Information

The collection was purchased from Bill Blackbeard, director of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, in 1997.

Processing Information

Materials were processed by Christian Ayers, Rebecca Baldwin, Amelia Catalano, Ryan Clouston, Justin Culver, Dorothy Garwood, Akhila Gautam, Jennifer Gerbino, Brittany Gray, Hannah Harris, Kate Gresham, Jimena Guevara, Ted Han, Craig Holet, Gita Indiyani, Sven Kahns, Mark Lavernuick, Travis Leonard, Susan Liberator, Amy McCrory, Laura Maddox, Sachi Miyazawa, Arki Prizananda, Allison Reid, Sang Hoon Cha, Deirdre Scaggs, Zachary Swartz, Elizabeth Valasco, Annabelle Wiese, and Beth Wong.

Detailed Description/Box and Folder Listing