I’ve never been a fan of comic strips, even as a child, but a passage at the Los Angeles Review of Books by Brian Doherty about comics curator Bill Blackbeard caught my eye. It woud seem that one man’s obsession is responsible for much of the trove of pulpy panels still available to us. An excerpt:

“The historian, editor, and collector Bill Blackbeard made the world of modern comic strip reprints possible by his dogged efforts to rescue them from far-flung newspapers being systematically destroyed by libraries. With his masterful co-edited Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics anthology in 1977, Blackbeard exposed a generation of fans and cartoonists to the fact that moldering, disappeared old comic strips were cool and desirable.

Blackbeard personally clipped and collated over 350,000 Sunday strips and over 2 million dailies, stored them in his own home for decades, and eventually donated them to Ohio State University. Jenny Robb, who now curates the archive Blackbeard created, says that Blackbeard’s careful preservation, contextualization, and editing ‘transformed comic strips into objects with legitimate cultural, historic and sometimes even aesthetic value.'”

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Fiorello La Guardia reads Dick Tracy, 1945: