I know I keep harping on this matter of people misspelling the names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. I apologize for that. It's just that it strikes me as the simplest kind of error. I mean, there are a number of areas of dispute in comic book history. You'd think we could all, at least, get the inarguable stuff right.
But what just dawned on me about eight seconds ago was that the Internet has become a kind of sloppy fact-checker. In faulting that Newsday reporter, I said that if he'd just taken the few moments to Google "Blondie," he could have found out who was currently doing the strip, instead of the names he gave. That's true…if (boldface "if") he'd had the presence of mind to know what he was reading. The official Blondie website or the King Features Syndicate site are as close to authoritative as you could get. But there's also faulty info on the Internet. Lots of it.
Case in point. If someone wanted to check the spelling on Siegel and Shuster, Googling will only get them so far. If you go search for Siegel AND Schuster AND Superman, you get (at this moment) around 25,600 hits. I'm sure some of the people who got it wrong did that kind of search and interpreted that result as verification. So they print Joe's name as Schuster and now the next guy who "fact-checks" that way will find there are, like, 25,601 hits. In fact, I probably just added to the pile with this posting.