The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against The Underground

Levin, Bob

ISBN 10: 156097530X / ISBN 13: 9781560975304

Published by Fantagraphics, 2003

About this Item

Very Good text, minor to light reading wear to text and dust jacket. US orders shipped via US Mail. International orders shipped via DHL. Additional postage may be required on oversize books and sets. NO prison orders.

Seller Inventory # 2412080035

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against The Underground
• Publisher: Fantagraphics
• Publication Date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 156097530X
• ISBN 13: 9781560975304
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 24 ounces
• Signed: Signed by Author

About this title

Synopsis

In the 1960s, Dan O'Neill, the creator of Odd Bodkins, assembled a band of rogue cartoonists, who together waged war against Disney, the ultimate enemy of their counterculture movement. Their Air Pirates Funnies featured Disney characters participating in obscene behaviour, provoking a mammoth lawsuit for copywright and trademark infringements that would rage for ten years, going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. This rollicking saga features never-before-seen art from the Air Pirates archives.

Synopsis

During a time of unprecedented political, social, and cultural upheaval in U.S. history, one of the fiercest battles was ignited by a comic book. In 1963, the San Francisco Chronicle made 21-year-old Dan O'Neill the youngest syndicated cartoonist in American newspaper history. As O'Neill delved deeper into the emerging counterculture, his strip, Odd Bodkins, became stranger and stranger and more and more provocative, until the papers in the syndicate dropped it and the Chronicle let him go. The lesson that O'Neill drew from this was that what America most needed was the destruction of Walt Disney. O'Neill assembled a band of rogue cartoonists called the Air Pirates. They lived communally in a San Francisco warehouse owned by Francis Ford Coppola and put out a comic book, Air Pirates Funnies, that featured Disney characters participating in very un-Disneylike behaviour, provoking a mammoth lawsuit for copyright and trademark infringements and hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. The lawsuit raged for 10 years, from the trial court to the US Supreme Court and back again.

The novelist and essayist Bob Levin recounts this rollicking saga with humour, wit, and intelligence bringing alive the times, the issues, the absurdities, the personalities, the changes wrought within them and us all. Includes never-before seen art from the Air Pirates archives.