Finding that libraries were discarding bound newspapers after microfilming, he established the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art in 1968 as a non-profit organization and began collecting newspapers from California libraries, expanding his scope to institutions nationwide. Following three decades of acquisition, accumulating some 75 tons of material, he turned the SFACA Collection over to Ohio State University's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, where it is available for research. Six semi-trailer trucks were needed to move the collection from California to Ohio. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum offered this description of Blackbeard's collection:

Materials in the collection include clipped comic strips, single comic pages, complete Sunday comic sections, and entire newspapers. The focus of the first two years of work on this collection, supported by grants from the Getty Foundation, the Scripps Howard Foundation and the Charles D. Farber Memorial Foundation, has been to establish a chronological run of each comic feature, either by amassing a group of clippings, or by identifying each feature's location in the collection of Sunday comic sections. The distinction between comic clippings and comic sections is significant. The collector's original intent was to establish a complete run, from beginning to end, of every comic feature to have appeared in an American newspaper. In most cases, this meant clipping examples of each feature from various newspapers, for two reasons. First, no single newspaper could have run every comic feature. Second, any given newspaper might print a feature for a certain length of time, and then drop it, either temporarily or permanently. Newspaper strikes and mail strikes could also interfere with the continuous run of a feature in a given publication. However, some features were never clipped from the original comic sections in which they appeared. The collector recognized that many of the early comic sections, dating from the 1890s to the 1920s, were extremely rare, and should be kept intact. In addition to the comic art they contain, many feature elaborate headers, marginal illustrations, and illustrated advertisements, all forming part of the overall design of the publication.

After he sold the collection to Ohio State in 1997, Blackbeard moved from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, California where he continues to contribute to books and indulge his interests, in addition to comic strips, in pulp magazines, old movies and penny dreadfuls.

It was Blackbeard who told Nicholson Baker about "fraudulent" studies used by libraries to justify their massive destruction of books and newspapers, information documented by Baker in his book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001), a National Book Critics Circle Award Winner. Baker devotes the preface of this book to his discussions with Blackbeard.

Blackbeard's efforts to preserve comic strips in complete runs and publish the work of notable comic artists made him a 2004 Eisner Hall of Fame finalist.