Originally published in 2023.

I had the joy of sorting newspapers during my visit last week to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. I had been invited out to be part of a printing and papercraft day—more on that in a future post; it was glorious—and arrived a couple days early to trawl through the library’s archives. But I had a little time free outside my reserved reading room hours, and Ann Lennon took me up on a volunteer offer.

Ann is the co-curator (with Caitlin McGurk) of the current “Man Saves Comics!” celebration of Bill Blackbeard’s 2.5 million item newspaper comics collection. She’s also the person heading up the ongoing effort to catalog Blackbeard’s materials. You can donate towards this work! (Formally, they are part of the collection acquired from the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, a non-profit Blackbeard created as libraries wouldn’t donate the stuff they were throwing away to individuals.)

She had set aside a decade or so of Winsor McCay (1866–1934) and other artists’ editorial cartoons produced weekly to illustrate Hearst chain executive Arthur Brisbane’s (1864–1936) declarative, sometimes unhinged-sounding essays. (Brisbane’s writing was read by an estimated third of the American population! That number is probably exaggerated by a factor of two or more, the article I link to even admits. But it’s still a lot of people)