Bill Blackbeard

Bill Blackbeard was born William Elsworth Blackbeard on April 28, 1926. He is best known as a writer-editor and the founder-director of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, a vast archive of American newspaper comic strips and cartoon art. This collection, which he assembled over decades, contained roughly 2.5 million clippings, tearsheets, and comic sections dating from 1894 to 1996, providing essential source material for his own work and that of other researchers. Blackbeard’s path into comics was through preservation and scholarship rather than traditional cartooning; he became a leading historian of the medium. His most-credited titles in our catalog include *Tarzan in Color*, *Polly and Her Pals*, *Buster Brown*, *Jim Hardy*, *Little Nemo 1905-1914*, and *Buz Sawyer*, for which he wrote 22 issues between 1971 and 2005. He collaborated with other scholars and publishers to reprint classic strips, helping to revive interest in early 20th-century newspaper comics. Blackbeard died on March 10, 2011. His legacy rests on rescuing and cataloging a monumental body of ephemeral art, and his collection remains a vital resource for comic strip history.