Air Pirates

The Air Pirates were a group of cartoonists who created two issues of an underground comic called Air Pirates Funnies in 1971, leading to a famous lawsuit by Walt Disney Productions. Founded by Dan O'Neill, the group also included Bobby London, Shary Flenniken, Gary Hallgren, and Ted Richards.

The original Air Pirates were a gang of Mickey 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.

The lead stories in both issues of Air Pirates Funnies (published by Last Gasp in July & August 1971), created by O'Neill, London, and Hallgren, focused on Walt Disney characters, most notably from Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, with the Disney characters engaging in adult behaviors such as sex and recreational drug use. 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 the Big Bad Wolf and the Three 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 the Air Pirates collective began to form in late 1969-early 1970, when London met Richards at the office of the Berkeley Tribe, an underground newspaper where both were staff cartoonists. (London later drew a highly fictionalized account of their experiences at the Tribe in his story "Why Bobby Seale is Not Black" in the Air Pirates' comic Merton of the Movement.) In 1970 London and Richards attended the Sky River Rock Festival near Portland, Oregon, and met Flenniken and O'Neill at the media booth, 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 cartoonist Gary Hallgren at the festival.

Meanwhile, O'Neill, who was producing the strip Odd Bodkins for the San 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 and Pluto, into the strip. In late November 1970, the Chronicle 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 the Seattle 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 to Odd Bodkins.

In early 1971 O'Neill invited Flenniken, Richards, and Hallgren to San Francisco to form the Air Pirates collective. The Air Pirates lived together in a warehouse on Harrison Street in San Francisco, where London and Flenniken began a relationship that turned into a short-lived marriage.