Death of Newspapers #11: The Vault of Caswell
Lucy Caswell, curator of the
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, gives us a guided tour, noting the 1998 addition of Bill Blackbeard's San Francisco Academy of Comic Art collection. The Great Comic Strip Trek of 1998 required six 18-wheelers to deliver the 75 tons of Blackbeard's collection from California to Ohio. Thanks to Caswell and Blackbeard, even as newspapers die, comic strips live on. For more on Blackbeard, go
here.
But who was Billy Ireland? From 1898 to 1935, he was a cartoonist working in Ohio for
The Columbus Dispatch, drawing his regular full-page comics feature,
The Passing Show. Pages by Ireland, Winsor McCay and Milton Caniff can be seen in the Caswell video above. Below are details from
The Passing Show. For more about Ireland, read this
review by writer-artist J. Caleb Mozzocco.
Labels: bill blackbeard, billy ireland, death of newspapers, lucy caswell, nicholson baker