Comics historian and retailer Robert Beerbohm died on March 27 at his home in Fremont, Nebraska, after battling colorectal cancer. He was 71.
As the New York Times notes in its obituary, Beerbohm was one of the co-founders, along with Bud Plant and John Barrett, of what is considered to be the first comic book retail chain, Comics and Comix. The store initially opened in Berkeley, California, in 1972, but later expanded to seven locations. After parting ways he opened his own store, Best of Two Worlds, in 1976.
That alone would merit an impressive mark in any chronicle of the medium, but Beerbohm was also something of a scholar, toiling away on mailing lists, message boards and other online forums (as well as perpetually working on his unfinished book, Comic Book Store Wars) to challenge conventional fan wisdom and champion a broader view of comics history. To that end, he is credited with discovering what is now considered to be the first comic printed in America, The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, an 1842 bootleg version of Les Amours de monsieur Vieux Bois by Rodolphe Töpffer.
In the wake of Beerbohm's passing, we reached out to a number of notable comics academics, writers and historians, and asked them to share their memories about Beerbohm and their impressions of his influence.
–The Editors
My earliest correspondence with Robert Beerbohm involved George Herriman’s hair and hats. This was back in 2001. I was investigating a small but intense fissure among Krazy Kat scholars as to whether George Herriman had Black ancestry. His birth certificate, from 1880, said “colored,” as did the birth certificates of his parents. But Herriman always presented himself as white and there was pushback against the idea that he might be part Black from some who knew Herriman (notably the cartoonist Karl Hubenthal) and some scholars (Bill Blackbeard and Richard Marschall).
I was intrigued by one evocative detail: the story repeated in many articles and books that Herriman always wore a hat. As it turned out, that was untrue. Beerbohm, who I met via a comics Listserv, told me he was “accumulating photos of George Herriman without his hat” and that these photos show the “waves” in his hair “which only comes thru a black person’s ‘kinky’ hair all slicked down.” This corresponded with something I came across in Herriman’s correspondence, his reference to his “kinky” hair.
Collecting photos of Herriman sans chapeau might seem an odd thing to do. Focusing on his hair could be seen as equally odd.
But out of small details are mighty issues settled. Bob and I were only doing early detective work. Michael Tisserand in Krazy, his terrific and definitive biography of George Herriman, would reveal that behind the mystery of Herriman’s ethnicity lay a family that was deeply entangled with the Black freedom struggles of the 19th century.
I was very grateful to Bob not just for sharing his research but his attitude towards the debate, which was open-minded and empirical. Too much of comics scholarship at the time was mired, I thought, in received wisdom, regurgitated half-true (at best) anecdotes from old newspapers, magazines and a few pioneering books. Bob had a different approach. He was willing to look at questions with a fresh eye and search for new evidence.
Bob was a collector, art dealer and bookseller, but he was also a scholar. It’s a mistake to think that scholarship is confined only to academia. Outside the universities, there’s a vast body of history research done either by amateurs or people whose job requires them to have expertise in the past. This is certainly true of collectors, art dealers and booksellers. In the history of the book, much of the best research we have about subjects like printing and publishing comes from book dealers who need to establish, for their catalogue, very detailed information about when books were published, by whom, and in what editions.
In his memoir Shut Up He Explained (2007), the Canadian critic and fiction writer John Metcalf argues:
We owe a large debt to those who own and run used-book stores. They are in no small way the custodians of culture. Most of them enjoy teaching and are generous with advice and knowledge. They are part of our hope for the next generation. I still have warm memories of forty years ago listening to Mr. Heinemann in the Mansfield Book Mart as he taught a first-year McGill student how to read a Scribners alphabetical code on the reverse of the title page. Yes, said Mr. Heinemann, it was a first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls but it bore under the date the letter "H" which meant that it was an eighth printing of the first edition, and therefore to a collector of little value.
The indicia is a small matter, but within it there is a wealth of information about publishing history.
Bob had that quality that Metcalf praises in used book dealers, a voracious need to find out the facts about old books (in Bob’s case, old comic books). Much of the history of comics is entoiled in mythology growing out of the fannish origins of comic book culture. For example, the pamphlet form invented in the early 1930s is fetishized as what comic books are, in ignorance of the long history of cartoon books going back centuries.
Bob was a scholar in the best sense of the word. He was a vast font of knowledge of the history of comics going back to the 19th century, if not earlier, and broke a trail in the research of many subjects (19th century humor books, the early comic strips, the early comic books, underground comics) that countless other researchers have followed along. I relied on him heavily for research into artists like George Herriman, Frank King and Jack Kirby. I'm not alone in this. He was the height of generosity and also an exceptionally moral man. He made enemies because he would talk about things that made certain interested parties upset (Stan Lee’s deceptions about the origins of Marvel comics, or the widespread theft of comics art in the 1960s and 1970s). These remain touchy topics, but Bob addressed them forthrightly because they were part of history. He was a searcher of the truth.
Some found Bob to be cantankerous, if not cranky. That was never my experience. It’s natural to disagree about subjects where the truth is murky. I sometimes disagreed with the conclusions Bob drew, but always respected the fact that his conclusions rested on genuine research and fresh thought. He didn’t come to his judgements without reason, even when they could be disputed. Comics scholars will continue to draw on Bob’s research for decades to come.
James R. Thompson
“I never started out to be in the comic book business ever, this was a hobby that got way out of hand a long time ago.” –Bob Beerbohm
“They have no facts so they attack the messenger. This is why I just cannot, will not, back down. Spock Logic, Klingon Honor, Kirk recklessness.” –Bob Beerbohm
The Bob Beerbohm I’ve known for the past 10 years had a comic-encyclopedic brain and lived in a comic-encyclopedic house. Bob had been wired that way going back to junior high when he’d knock on neighborhood doors to score comic back issues for free or on the cheap. He was still that way when we spoke two days before he died - one last sermon from his comics pulpit.
In his last decade, Bob relied largely on Facebook to spread his words, debunk some myths and deliver justice. His Facebook presence in around 2,000 comic groups, including mine and several of his own creation, seemed almost omnipresent.
“Knowing there are highly contentious issues amongst a wide range of various ‘organized’ comics fandoms… my posting flows in various groups, my own two profile pages of Robert 5,000 full house, plus new 'Bob' page just pushed past 2,100 growing daily for a while now, plus Comic Book Store Wars, Platinum, the Rick Griffin pages I administer. I know souls I seek to reach like Mike Uslan, Mark Evanier, Mark Seifert, many others I consider peers, is happening.” –Bob’s FB message to me from April, 2022.
Sometimes, it may have been happening too much.
“Maybe I will just take the research contents of this house, have it trucked to the local landfill, and be done with all the comics craziness.” -Bob’s FB message to me from May 2022.
Bob liked to talk about comic LOST souls, comic fans who needed further education or collectors too caught up in their comics’ condition rather than content, falling for the slabbing “scam.” Sometimes he sounded positively evangelical. In the CBH interview I did with my co-host, Alex Grand, Bob preached with force: “I don’t want a board and bag, I want to read the damn thing and I’m probably going to bend a corner in the process.” Bob first fell in love with comics upon discovering Hal Foster, and every new decade a Frazetta or Kaluta would come along to reignite the torch.
Sometimes though, that torch seemed more like one carried by an angry villager. When I occasionally deleted an overly-zealous Beerbohm post in my group, he would often respond apologetically, saying, “I work on so much other aspects of comics business history, accidentally creating havoc is last thing I wish to happen.” But even more often I’d get, “I do not post to create flame wars. I post research which some others get bent out of shape about because it goes against life long held myths they learned,” or “Is there a list of permitted persons who can be covered? And those who cannot be due to myth rumors they walk on water?” One of our biggest fights was when I tried to compliment him, calling him comics’ great “muckraker,” and predicted his Comic Book Store Wars would be The Jungle for comics. He didn’t get it, and said a muckraker was just a guy looking for trouble. And yet, that WAS Bob. He was a sort of muckraker at heart.
“Sometimes one shakes the bushes just a bit to see where the perceived snakes hiding in the branches are.” –Bob’s FB message to me from February 2022.
Bob’s interactions on Facebook might not have always done him any favors and his posting style could be rambling, but he understood that comics–the art, the business, the fandom, the history–ALL were similarly dependent upon detailed mappings of communities and inter-connections, i.e., social networks and information threads. It was no different than how Bob learned of, and then acquired, his greatest contribution to comics history - The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck. The story, as Bob told it, began with a 1941 comic book thread by Lovecraft publisher August Derleth in American Notes and Queries, a journal where someone would ask a question and then a few months later somebody else would supply an answer.
In January 1946, Gershon Legman, cultural critic and author of Love and Death. A study in censorship, responded to that Derlith thread from five years prior, mentioning The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck as the very first American comic book, and listing dozens of other 19th century comic prototypes. From there, Bob started typing names of these titles into Usenet. Six months later, Bob received word from a young single mother in Oakland, California, who then sold him a first edition of Oldbuck that had been in her family for seven generations. And the rest is history.
Bob saw Facebook similarly. In fact, I think Bob saw virtually everything in terms of networks, receptacles for him to plug in that comic-encyclopedic brain of his.
“What needs to happen for all this comics history to be properly taught, and consequently passed on to future generations, is a multi-episode multi-season streaming thing on say Netflix, HBO, etc. who could and would pump the millions of dollars in to hiring the XGI experts to make it as sensational as it could be. To properly teach what I envision would take tens of thousands of images from 175+ worth of just USA comic books, etc. Most all the books done to date are like blind men all touching part of the elephant. The Macro picture needs to be presented. Thousands of stories. Otherwise, there is little concrete context.” –Bob’s FB message to me from July 2022
In March of 2024, Bob reached out to me and we spent several days talking about what he wanted to officially say about his unfinished mammoth project which began in 1994, Comic Book Store Wars. A few days later, Bob posted this:
"I continue talking about Comic Book Store Wars because the posts are all part of that same project. Store Wars is a yet unfinished book; it is also a research group, a multimedia project, its own archive, and everything else that forms my legacy of a life devoted to comics. I think it’s a worthwhile endeavor and I will keep circulating, and thereby preserving, what I’ve done so far, while I spend my remaining time doing what I can, while recognizing the fact that the project will outlive me and will likely need other authors to bring it home.”
Now it’s up to us.
Next year!
Friend, colleague and mentor, Bob Beerbohm was always there, always ready to help, always willing to share his knowledge and the materials he had at hand.
I got to know about Bob in the 1990s due to his involvement with the Platinum Age Comics discussion group, which he set up and ran with an iron fist, garnering him the much-treasured nickname “Sheriff Bob.” His messages were always overflowing with information and enthusiasm, making a marked impression on a young me. So, when I was planning my first ever trip to the international comics festival in Angoulême, France, and realized that Bob was also going to be there, I of course arranged to meet him face to face. Well, Bob being Bob, he didn’t just want to sit down for a beer, even though we did that too. He took me under his wing and showed me around for several days, introducing me to everyone, from fellow comics historians from all over the world to artists like Art Spiegelman.
When he realized that I was just finishing a book on Black characters, he promised to go through his own collections to help me out, which he of course did once home again. Several of the more esoteric and important early examples in my book Black Images in the Comics actually came from Bob, digging through his piles and piles of comics.
We then met up in Angoulême several more times and Bob was always incredibly open, friendly and cosmopolitan. He’s one of the reasons why I've come back to the Angoulême festival every year since then, not the least to take part in the Platinum Age Comics dinner that we organize every year - without a doubt the most international and friendly comics meeting I attend each year.
It breaks my heart that for at least the last 10 years or so, when I've reported from Angoulême on social media, Bob always responded with "Next year!" Well, now we know you won’t be there next year, but we will raise a glass or three in your honor!
The "days of daze" are over. Bob Beerbohm has left the convention floor.
It’s hard to believe, although I knew it was coming. Bob kept us all up to date with his fearless battle against cancer, discussing it frankly at the same time as he was continually posting on comics history, literally to the moment he died.
I’d been talking with Bob away from these public spheres. He had hopes of knocking this cancer down, eking out a few more years to get his book done. The last time was a week before he died, following one of his last, ominous health updates. It sounded like final resignation had begun to set in.
I knew Bob about 25 years, met him several times, both in New York and in San Diego. The rest of our interaction was online across two and a half decades of emails, mailing lists, chat groups and Facebook. He was on the old Kirby-L mailing list reflector in the 1990s, on two different permutations of the old Timely-Atlas Yahoo groups, and innumerable other Facebook groups we shared together, including my Timely-Atlas-Comics and New York Sunday News Comics groups. Bob was a tireless researcher on comic book and comic strip artistic history, and comics publishing history for over 50 years. He was a researcher, a collector, a retailer, one of the first comic shop owners and the world expert on the history of the business side of the comic book industry. He knew everybody, had witnessed it all, and was collating his lifetime of knowledge and experience into a future book, Comic Book Store Wars, partially written. He is singly responsible for taking our comics history back to Rodolphe Töpffer's The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck.
Bob also was extremely outspoken, and this part of his personality occasionally put him at odds with some people. I’m not going to judge this. He was warm, engaging, and could be your closest friend. He was also stubborn; very, very stubborn. And that stubbornness, I believe, often affected relationships. (That's ok, I can be pretty stubborn also.) He was human. There are many people who had close relationships with him damaged. Some of this I chalk up to the impersonal nature of online friendships and discussions. Others, for reasons I'm not privy to, are unknown to me, and I cannot comment on. But while living the dream of having your passion as your actual job, it could be a hard life. And Bob had to deal with an inordinate amount of physical pain over the last decade and a half. If I recall correctly, a pre-existing condition would not allow him to be covered for bilateral hip replacements. This led to years of excruciating pain that completely affected his retail business. It also led to periods of emotionally aggressive displays online that now, in retrospect, make perfect sense, but helped contribute to clashes he had. If I also recall correctly, industry friends finally helped him be able to have the surgery he needed. Then there was the medical crises with his beloved daughter, Katy. I'm a father myself, yet I don't think I've ever seen such a devoted father in my entire life. What he did, the desperate measures he took, the public love he engendered, all in the hope of bringing healing to Katy, went beyond all fatherly outlays. So yeah, Bob could be a curmudgeon, but I cut him a massive break.
For a short while over a decade ago, after he was quoted in a footnote in our [Vassallo's and Blake Bell's] book, The Secret History of Marvel Comics, he was even upset with me. To this day I don’t know what he was angry about, but I got a call in my office, with a message of wanting to talk with me. I called him back and went through the matter step by step, showing him all we did was accurately quote him, but for a reason I've never been able to understand he felt we were either slighting him or negating his research. What was going on at the time in his personal life, I do not know, but somehow I smoothed it over (don't ask me how) and I never, ever felt anything untoward about the entire thing. Bob went on to champion the book vociferously, for which I was grateful.
It was also Bob who was responsible for my friendship with Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. Back in the late 1990s, cognizant of my plan to acquire and index the contents to every single Timely/Atlas comic book, Bob suggested I contact Jim, as our research paths intersected and dovetailed closely. I did so, leading to a fruitful 20-year friendship of Timely/Atlas art-spotting projects with Jim and the late Hames Ware. For this, I'm eternally grateful to Bob.
Since a series of strokes and his cancer diagnosis (events that would curtail the average person's internet presence), Bob's engagement with his friends online seemed to increase exponentially. It was as if he wanted to get all his research, opinion, comics history loves and troves of data out there for the world to see before it was too late. The day he died, I saw at least four or five posts to his Facebook page or other pages, the last about Jack Kirby's work for Gilberton. I would just love to know how soon after he sent that missive he breathed his last. It's pretty fitting. That's devotion to a lifelong passion.
Bob, I'm going to miss you a great deal. You were a daily, constant virtual presence in my life for a quarter century. My deepest condolences to your family, to Katy, and to those who knew you better than I did. And since I know how much you loved Bill Everett's Venus, and were waiting impatiently for my Venus Vol. 2 collection from Fantagraphics [published this past Tuesday], I dedicate the book to you. You would have loved it. May our "days of daze" never stop.
Bob Beerbohm and I corresponded in roughly the late-mid 1990s when I was beginning to research the history of comic shops and the rise of the direct market. I don’t remember how we got connected. (I reached out to him, I think?) I do remember that Bob was generous and helpful. At that time, I was just starting to lecture on the history of the U.S. comic book market, both in and outside of university classrooms, and Bob offered me encouragement as well as corrections and new perspectives. I remember that he sent me a substantial mailing that included an offprint or zine of some of his writing about the direct market’s history, which he described as a part of Comic Book Store Wars, an ongoing book project. As I understood it, this was to have been a sweeping history of comics publishing, distribution and retail. This was jaw-dropping.
Bob’s influence on my dissertation, later my book Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005), is inadequately acknowledged in a single endnote:
The greatest fund of detail on the history of the [direct] market can be found in the scattered writings of veteran dealer/collector Robert Beerbohm, e.g., “Unstable Equilibria” (1997) and “Secret Origins” (2000).
I regret that I didn’t say more. My particular interest at the time was the question of “how much underground and mainstream comic books overlapped” in the comic shops of the early 1970s (Alternative 21). The question remains a live one for me. Bob’s background as one of co-founders of the Bay Area’s Comics and Comix retail chain, and later as proprietor of his own shop, Best of Two Worlds, practically guaranteed my interest in his work - and his recollections of those days were vivid. Where I got puzzled was with Bob’s overarching big picture of comics-selling, which he traced back into the 1800s, making it difficult, I thought, to corral his research into a single book’s worth of work and even harder to describe his research agenda. For Bob, it was all of a piece. Comic Book Store Wars was to have gathered it all together.
Regrettably, Bob did not live to complete that grand project, but of course he continued proactively corresponding with and encouraging, and sometimes jousting with, other comics historians. His work reached wide and deep, going beyond his original expertise in contemporary comic book distribution and retail. I was always on the lookout for more work by him - eager, bemused too, but sure that his voluble recollections contained volumes’ worth of important comics history.
Bob was especially proud of connecting events in today’s comics markets with now all-but-forgotten 19 century antecedents. He became a specialist in Platinum Era (roughly, pre-1930s) comic books and periodicals, and pushed for their inclusion in the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. He traced U.S. comics history as far back as The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck in 1842, a supplement to the weekly Brother Jonathan (reprinted from Tilt and Bogue’s London edition of 1841, itself plagiarized from Aubert’s 1839 bootleg of Töppfer’s original Les Amours de monsieur Vieux Bois of 1837 - whew!). As Jim Thompson notes here, this may have been Bob’s greatest contribution to comics historiography: he identified Obadiah as America’s first comic book, and he encouraged scholarly conversation around it. Notably, he enabled and participated in its reprinting by Alfredo Castelli’s Comicon Edizioni imprint (2003). That alone was a stupendous achievement - yet there I was, still trying to make sense of Bob’s retail and distribution stories of the 1960s and '70s. If I was slow, Bob was a meteor shower!
I and some of my colleagues clearly recall Bob bringing Obadiah with him to academic conferences, almost as if that book were his calling card. I remember the 2002 International Comic Arts Forum (held in conjunction with the Small Press Expo), where Bob carried multiple editions of Obadiah in, as I recall, a metallic briefcase that he would open and show to any interested party. What follows is Bob’s own recollection from the Platinum Comics list that he co-moderated, in a post dated Sept. 11, 2002. It is worth quoting at length:
Well, I survived my first ICAF/SPX event.
It was good meeting many listers and old & new friends who attended - both for the first time and some for the umpteenth, including (but certainly not limited to) Don Ault, (roommate) Ray Bottorff, Eddie Campbell, Mike Catron, Sara Duke, Tom Inge, Steve Geppi, Paul Gravett, Charles Hatfield, Gene Kannenberg, Martha Kennedy, Denis Kitchen, John Lent, Ana Merino, Jeff Miller, Francoise Mouly, Mark Nevins, Nhu-Hoa Nguyen, Mike Rhode, Mark Rogers, John Ronan, Roger Sabin, Art Spiegelman, Guy Spielmann, Bryan Talbot, Doug Wheeler, Craig Yoe, and too many more I cannot recall off the top of my head - my apologies, as I know I have left many more persons I talked with off my list.
Prior to ICAF beginning, I spent a day and a half in the Library of Congress, researching 1800s comics material. Found an 1865 Thomas Nast sequential as well as a number of early 1870s pre Brownies Palmer Cox sequentials. I have to rework my notes before I can place something substantial on this list.
For the very last time in the foreseeable future, I brought along my original copies of Obadiah Oldbuck to a show. I also brought along my recently acquired Brainy Bowers & Drowsy Duggan from 1905. Airport screeners are not tuned into handling old paper very well when searching one's stuff. To all those who expressed interest in looking at these artifacts, I wonder if your consciousness was raised a bit.
After showing Obadiah around to the people who care about what it is who have seen it so far, I am struck by how “quiet” most viewers become when they first see it. -:)
Friday night found me with Eddie Campbell in an intense look-see comparison of the three Obadiah versions I own…
This was Bob. The post captures his excitement about doing historical work - an excitement that was palpable to anyone who could buttonhole Bob, or got buttonholed by him, at a conference or show. Somehow, he was able to pursue his passion for comic books into the deep past and to share it widely, ceaselessly. Formative interactions with collectors like Ernie McGee and Bill Blackbeard seemed to have ignited something in him, and the result was Bob’s endless questing, digging and proselytizing. By 2002 he was filling in gaps in US comics history in ways comparable to David Kunzle’s work on pre-1900 European comics, and doing work that anticipated the scholarship into early 19th century American work that we now see from scholars such as Alex Beringer and Jared Gardner. This is excellent and important work.
I have to face the fact that I’ll never get to talk to or learn from Bob again, and that guts me. He was passionate, instructive, often surprising, and, as Jeet Heer reminds us, open-minded and unafraid when it came to questioning received histories. His work reminds me that comics publishers need to be considered as publishers first, and that economic considerations (for example, the ready availability of paper in bulk) often prompted what fans tend to think of as artistic innovations. While Bob was not simply an economic determinist—I think he loved comic art too much for that—he sought to demythologize the business of comic books.
Here his interests as a fan and as a dealer overlapped, and in this way he has taught me a great deal.
When I think of Bob, I think of lingering research questions and claims that I believe are still important. Here are just a few:
- Bob maintained that the very roots of the direct market were in speculation - that is, the frantic activity of speculators who would stockpile hot comics in hopes of making a killing. He argued that speculation was not a minor byproduct or aftereffect of the direct market, but in fact its original raison d’ être. In this, he spoke as a reformed or retired speculator himself. I think this is an important perspective.
- On a related note, Bob claimed that by the early 1970s fraud was endemic to the distribution of comic books. Many U.S. comic books were sold by wholesalers to speculators under the table, and those sales went unreported; that is, false affidavits reported the books unsold and claimed credit for “returns,” when in fact the books had been sold to collectors and dealers. Routine fraud, then, depressed the sales figures for mainstream comics in the early 1970s. This seems to have incentivized publishers to begin courting the more reliable direct market (though Bob also showed that DC and Marvel were slow to do this). Of course, such fraudulent activity was criminal, hence undocumented, so this line of argument has been hard to solidify - but the idea has taken hold in comic book historiography. Many have cited it, and Bob was their source.
- On the other hand, Bob adamantly maintained that the direct market came about not from distributor Phil Seuling’s overtures to mainstream publishers in the early 1970s (as is most often claimed), but from the effective nationwide distribution of underground comix, which he credited to the Print Mint’s going national with Crumb’s Zap Comix in 1968. Bob did not discount Seuling as an innovator, but claimed that the basis of the direct market was really in the alternative economy of the underground. Of course, as a dealer and retailer he had sold undergrounds alongside more mainstream fare (a practice implied in the moniker “Comics and Comix”). This line of argument might be considered a matter of semantic hairsplitting only, but for me it continues to be vital.
These claims and positions have been on my mind for a long time. Bob was the reason. For this, and myriad insights into the deeper, darker world of comics publishing and selling, I feel a tremendous debt of gratitude to him. He was a living conduit between comics’ past and present.
