Piracy or Parody?

John Martz | August 4th, 2005

Tom Spurgeon over at the Comics Reporter points this one out: you can view the entirety of the Air Pirates’ infamous Mickey Mouse meets the Air Pirates online!

The Air Pirates were a group of underground cartoonists (Dan O’Neill, Ted Richards, Bobby London, and Gary Hallgren) who were sued by Disney in 1972 thanks to the way (as you can read) the group drew Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters smuggling drugs and performing lewd sexual acts. Hallgren and Richards settled, while O’Neill and London decided to try their luck in court. In 1980, after years of legal battles, Disney agree to drop the case in exchange for the Pirates’ agreeing not to infringe their copyright.

There’s a gallery of the Air Pirates covers online, and for a full take on the Disney lawsuit read Disney and the Air Pirates and Bobby London and the Air Pirates Follies.

  • Gold!!! I struck it rich. What a wonderful link. Now I know what all the rage was about. Hopefully Walt and the boys don't shut down the site.
  • pete bangs
    This was absolutely wonderful. I was totally surprised to find what excellent draftsmen the air pirates were, particularly Bobby London, who appeared to have grown up on the strip cartoonists of the 20's and 30's.
  • As the Comics Reporter link points out, Issue #2 of Air Pirates is also online...
  • By the way, the Comics Reporter doesn't say where they got the link, but credit where credit is due, these two comics were originally posted on the Comics Commentary blog, in this post.
  • Justin
    Apparently the host has run out of bandwidth, any known mirrors? (this post was BoingBoinged)
  • Most of the comic pages still appear when I go to the site, but it seems like all the comics by Bobby London (the 'Dirty Duck' pages as well as 'Merton of the Movement') were taken down--maybe he requested this or something? I saved copies of all the pages, so I can send anyone the missing pages who's interested--my email is at the bottom of the front page of my website.
  • This is awesome. Cheers to another slam against the empire! Now all we need is somebody to subvert the garfield.
  • Thanks Jesse, for mentioning my blog. To really give credit where credit is due, I downloaded these from Usenet some years ago, so all credit really should go to the anonymous person who scanned them and posted them in the first place. I only uploaded them in a more visible place.

    I haven't taken any of the images down, so if people are having trouble it's probably due to bandwidth issues. I'd suggest keep on trying until all images appear.
  • Greg Potter
    When I went to the link, it said that the download could not be found. Could someone help me with the link?
  • Shiggity S
    Hey, thanks for the dead links.
  • It's always a bad idea to piss off an elephant. Especially when the elephant is rich and has a lawyer.
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