Bill Blackbeard was to comic strips what Forrest J. Ackerman was to science fiction — a lifelong, compulsive collector who wrote and edited articles and books about his hobby. Blackbeard’s singular passion was comic strips, and he saved millions of them by rescuing tons of newspapers. They’re all now in the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University. Blackbeard died in March, but the news wasn’t widely known until this past week.
At the other end of the comic strip game is the original art market, with Charles Schulz originals commanding premium prices. Heritage Auctions has a Schulz original being sold by the family of the real-life Frieda.
The piece predates Peanuts, but you can see where his work was headed. Its significance is that it seems to prove that Schulz didn’t adopt the four-panel format by choice. The art has only three panels, and Sparky wouldn’t return to doing that until February 29, 1988. Enlarge the image above and you will see that in his early work Schulz inked mostly with a brush, and not a pen as he would later do.
A big admirer of Schulz is cartoonist Jimmy Johnson, whose strip Arlo and Janis has been a favorite of mine for many years. It was introduced in 1985, the same year that Calvin and Hobbes premiered. Arlo and Janis began on July 29, and this photo of Jimmy ran in some of the papers that carried the new strip. The caption reads, “Arlo and Janis Day are anti-Yuppies, the young upwardly mobile who don’t glory in it, says their creator Jimmy Johnson.”
