Tom Spurgeon campaigns to get Bill Blackbeard in the Eisner Hall of Fame:
Bill Blackbeard is the embodiment of the impulse to see comics as more than that thing that is right before our eyes, more than that which is here and gone. He is comics’ Prester John. So much of what we value and enjoy in comics today and so much of what our grandsons and granddaughters and their progeny will enjoy 100 years from now owes its rescue from oblivion to his hard work and discerning eye.
It’s not just that Bill Blackbeard has been and still is instrumental in safeguarding the history of American comics, it’s that he showed, with The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics and his 200 (!) other books, that this history is so much older and richer than is apparent at first sight. Before Blackbeard, it was easy to assume that the American comic strip was at best the prehistory to the real birth of the American comic book, which, with some obvious exceptions can be ignored. But Blackbeard not only told us that the truth was otherwise, he showed us. As Tom says, books like the The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics opened people’s eyes to what had been published decades before they were, decades before the birth of the comic book itself and how sophisticated, interesting and good those comics were. If he hadn’t been there this history might have been partially or wholly lost, because it took somebody like Blackbeard to see the value in bundles of aging newsprint.