| Named after | Mickey Mouse antagonists of the 1930s |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1971; 55 years ago (1971) |
| Founder | Dan O'Neill |
| Founded at | San Francisco,California, U.S.A. |
| Dissolved | 1980; 46 years ago (1980) |
| Purpose | to parody old-time comic strips andThe Walt Disney Company |
| Products | Air Pirates Funnies comic books |
Key people | Bobby London,Gary Hallgren,Ted Richards,Shary Flenniken |
| Subsidiaries | Mouse Liberation Front |
TheAir Pirates were a group of cartoonists who created two issues of anunderground comic calledAir Pirates Funnies in 1971, leading to a famous lawsuit byWalt Disney Productions.[1] Founded byDan O'Neill, the group also includedBobby London,Shary Flenniken,Gary Hallgren, andTed Richards.
The original Air Pirates were a gang ofMickey Mouse antagonists of the 1930s; Dan O'Neill imagined Mickey Mouse to be a symbol of conformist hypocrisy in American culture, and therefore a ripe target for satire.[2]
The lead stories in both issues ofAir Pirates Funnies (published byLast Gasp in July & August 1971), created by O'Neill, London, and Hallgren, focused onWalt Disney characters, most notably fromFloyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, with the Disney characters engaging in adult behaviors such as sex and recreational drug use.[3] O'Neill insisted that the group did not dilute the parody by changing the names of the characters, so his adventurous mouse character was called "Mickey".
Ted Richards took on theBig Bad Wolf and theThree Little Pigs, opening up a second wave of parody attacking Disney's appropriation of European (and American) folklore. In doing so, they infringed Disney's copyrights by using without permission characters the company had created. On October 21, 1971, Disney filed a lawsuit against O'Neill, Hallgren, London and Richards (Flenniken had not contributed to the parody stories).
The nucleus of theAir Pirates collective began to form in late 1969-early 1970, when London met Richards at the office of theBerkeley Tribe, an underground newspaper where both were staff cartoonists. (London later drew a highly fictionalized account of their experiences at theTribe in his story "WhyBobby Seale is Not Black" in the Air Pirates' comicMerton of the Movement.)[4] In 1970 London and Richards attended theSky River Rock Festival nearPortland, Oregon, and met Flenniken and O'Neill at the media booth,[5] where Flenniken was producing a daily Sky River newsletter on a mimeograph machine. Before the festival was over the four of them produced a four-page tabloid comic,Sky River Funnies, mostly drawn by London. O'Neill also met Seattle-based cartoonistGary Hallgren at the festival.
Meanwhile, O'Neill, who was producing the stripOdd Bodkins for theSan Francisco Chronicle, but was fearful of losing his copyright over it, decided on an odd tactic to regain control of his strip:he would engage in copyright infringement, which he reasoned would force the newspaper to surrender the strip's copyright back to him for fear of being sued. O'Neill worked 28 Walt Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse andPluto, into the strip. In late November 1970, theChronicle fired O'Neill for the final time and discontinued the strip.
After the Sky River Rock Festival, Flenniken, Richards, and Hallgren returned to Seattle, where Flenniken created graphics for theSeattle Liberation Front's brief-lived underground newspaper,Sabot. London went back to San Francisco with O'Neil and started working with him, contributing a "basement" strip toOdd Bodkins.
In early 1971 O'Neill invited Flenniken, Richards, and Hallgren to San Francisco to form the Air Pirates collective.[6] The Air Pirates lived together in a warehouse on Harrison Street in San Francisco,[7] where London and Flenniken began a relationship that turned into a short-lived marriage.[8]
Each of the cartoonists shared a common interest in the styles of past masters of the comic strip, and – unrelated to their assault on Disney – in creating their stories for Air Pirates projects each set out to imitate the style of an old-time cartoonist:
After the Pirates were established,Willy Murphy,Larry Todd and Gary King started hanging around the collective and contributing to their projects, missing the originalAir Pirates Funnies but appearing in later Air Pirates comics.
Accurately telling the story of Disney's lawsuit against the Air Pirates is difficult, due to the conflicting memories of the litigants; however, it is fair to say that all through the lawsuit, O'Neill was defiant. He was so eager to be sued by Disney that he had copies ofAir Pirates Funnies smuggled into a Disney board meeting by the son of a board member. On October 21, 1971, he got his wish as Disney filed a lawsuit against O'Neill, Hallgren, London and Richards (Flenniken had not contributed to the parody stories),[5] alleging, among other things, copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and unfair competition. Disney later added Last Gasp publisherRon Turner's name to the suit. The Pirates, in turn, claimed that the parody wasfair use.[1]
The initial decision by JudgeAlbert Charles Wollenberg in theU.S. District Court, delivered on July 7, 1972, went against the Air Pirates, and O'Neill's lawyers appealed to theUnited States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. O'Neill suggested the other Pirates settle, and leave him to defend the case alone. Hallgren and Turner settled with Disney, but London and Richards decided to continue fighting. To raise money for the Air Pirates Defense Fund, O'Neill and other underground cartoonists sold original artwork – predominantly of Disney characters – atcomic book conventions.
During the legal proceedings and in violation of the temporary restraining order, the Air Pirates published some of the material intended for the third issue ofAir Pirates Funnies in the comicThe Tortoise and the Hare (Last Gasp, 1971), of which nearly 10,000 issues were soon confiscated under a court order. In 1975, Disney won a $200,000 preliminary judgement and another restraining order, which O'Neill defied by continuing to draw Disney parodies.[1]
The case dragged on for several years. Finally, in 1978, the Ninth Circuit ruled against the Air Pirates 3-0 for copyright infringement, although they dismissed the trademark infringement claims.[1] In 1979 theSupreme Court refused to hear an appeal. O'Neill later claimed that his plan in the Disney lawsuit was to lose, appeal, lose again, continue drawing his parodies, and eventually to force the courts to either allow him to continue or send him to jail.
O'Neill's four-page Mickey Mouse storyCommuniqué #1 from the M.L.F. (Mouse Liberation Front) appeared in the magazineCoEvolution Quarterly #21 in 1979. Disney asked the court to hold O'Neill incontempt of court and have him prosecuted criminally, along withStewart Brand, publisher ofCoEvolution Quarterly.[9] By mid-1979, O'Neill recruited diverse artists for a "secret" artist's organization, The Mouse Liberation Front. An M.L.F. art show was displayed inNew York City,Philadelphia andSan Diego. With the help of sympathetic Disney employees, O'Neill deliveredThe M.L.F. Communiqué #2 in person to the Disney studios, where he posed drawing Mickey Mouse at an animation table and allegedly smoked ajoint in Walt Disney's office.[10]
In 1980, weighing the unrecoverable $190,000 in damages and $2,000,000 in legal fees against O'Neill's continuing disregard for the court's decisions, Disney settled the case, dropping the contempt charges and promising not to enforce the judgment as long as the Pirates no longer infringed Disney's copyrights.
New York Law School professor Edward Samuels said of O'Neill after the judgment, "I was flabbergasted. He told me he had won the case. 'No, Dan,' I told him, 'You lost.' 'No, I won.' 'No, you lost.' To Dan O'Neill, not going to jail constituted victory." Samuels said of the Air Pirates, "They set parody back twenty years."[10]
O'Neill was interviewed about the ordeal in the 1988documentary filmComic Book Confidential.[11][12]
During the height of the Air Pirates "moment" (1971–1973), members of the collective were featured in other solo titles or anthologies:
As the '60s cultural revolution roared on, O'Neill decided that what America truly needed was the destruction of Walt Disney. So after the Chronicle canned him, he rounded up a ragtag band of rogue cartoonists who called themselves the Air Pirates, after a group of evildoers who had bedeviled Mickey Mouse in the 1930s. In 1971 they produced two issues of an underground comic book in which a number of Disney characters, particularly Mickey, engaged in very un-Disneylike behavior, particularly sex.
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