An exhibition of rescued comic strip art

time to page through the Sunday  comics with Luke Burbank [Music]   only a handful of people knew what Bill  Blackbeard was really up to for all those   years it was a real situation of you know some  one person's trash as another person's treasure   the treasure that Blackbeard and by the way  that's his real name was storing from floor   to ceiling in a San Francisco home was maybe the  largest most comprehensive private collection of   American newspaper Comics ever assembled he was  single-minded Caitlin mcgurk is curator of comics   and cartoon art at the Billy Ireland cartoon  library and museum at the Ohio State University he   felt a calling to preserve this type of material  that no one else really cared about you know   um I mean common guard is kind  of an underdog of the art world   the library is currently displaying just a sample  of the Trove of cartoons some two and a half   million pieces in all that bill Blackbeard amassed  over 30 years of collecting it's called man saves   Comics this is Little Nemo in Slumberland by  Windsor McKay one of the greatest cartoonists   in history one of the earliest Fantasy Comics we  have a complete run of Hugo Hercules it's from   1902 and it's essentially Superman 30 plus years  before Superman existed you might be wondering   why it fell to one eccentric scholar to do so  much of this preservation and why it matters   foreign well because there was a time long  ago before the internet when things were not   saved digitally meaning a Sunday morning comic  with its vibrant colors and social importance   could be lost forever if no one saved that  particular issue of that specific newspaper   why do you think newspaper Comics maybe didn't  get the respect that they deserve people have   historically viewed newspaper Comics or comics in  general as something that was just meant for kids   or made for the masses and so it was kind of  neglected for from the start for that reason   but they were important for a whole variety of  reasons from early representation of same-sex   relationships to Black Time Travelers two  entertaining the kids on a Sunday wow okay   so this is what a kid in 1904 yeah might have  made on like a Sunday afternoon yeah you could   put this together at home yourself and this was  you know affordable accessible entertainment for   children from all different walks of life there  were of course libraries that were converting   their collections of old newspapers onto microfilm  but that meant the rich colors of the comics would   be lost to history microfilm is entirely black and  white photography and it's film so it gets covered   in scratches and just after a few uses by patrons  can be rendered unusable which is where once again   Bill Blackbeard stepped in he essentially you  know with his wife and some volunteer friend   friends got a van and started traveling around  the United States amassing these discarded bound   volumes from newspapers so that he could clip the  comics section out of it and save it in his house   the only room that he didn't have newsprint in  was the bathroom because he was worried about   how the water would affect the paper decades later  Blackbeard was facing eviction from his California   rental home so he sold his collection to the  university but getting all that material to Ohio   that was no small feat it arrived in 1998 in six  semi trucks so it's 75 tons of newspaper clippings   and 25 years later they're still taking stock  we're at about 30 to 40 percent that has been   processed we have a lot of material that we  still have to get through Jenny Robb is head   curator of comics and cartoon art overseeing  a small team tasked with cataloging and   properly storing all those materials are  there boxes that haven't been opened yet   um there are boxes that have not been opened in  decades what has been opened and stored at exactly   64 degrees for archival purposes things like the  entire 1931 run of Blondie so if you want to read   Blondie you can just start at the beginning  and read right on through and there are the   names you might be less familiar with like Elsie  Robinson she was incredibly famous in her time she   had more than 20 million readers and just to put  that into perspective that's double the number of   subscribers today to the New York Times Allison  Gilbert co-wrote the first biography of Robinson   a single mother who created an editorial cartoon  and syndicated column Empire that ran from the   1920s through the 1950s she was able to take on  subject matters that perhaps weren't tackled in   other parts of the paper as readily feminism  marriage gender equality pay inequity racism   capital punishment Bill Blackbeard passed away  in 2011 but not before his life's passion the   preservation of an ephemeral and often  underestimated art form had been safely   transferred to a new generation sort of like  something out of a superhero story I have to   imagine he'd be pretty excited to see that this  is where it all LED we hope that he would be proud   and we've discovered such incredible things in  here and we're so grateful for what he did foreign [Music]

Channel: CBS Sunday Morning

Views: 81,733

Keywords: CBS Sunday Morning, CBS News, news, comic strip, art, bill blackbeard, comics

Id: h3zkd0ZwHBo

Length: 6min 5sec (365 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2023