Dan O'Neill is a cartoonist, creator of the syndicated comic strip Odd Bodkins and the underground comic book Air Pirate Funnies.
Odd Bodkins began its run in 1963 in the San Francisco Chronicle when O'Neill was 21 years old. The strip consisted of the adventures of Hugh and Fred the Bird. During the course of the strip's run, it increasingly reflected O'Neill's life in and critique of 1960s counter-culture. Though he considered himself a strong writer, O'Neill said of his artwork, "I had a very weak line. Either that or palsy."
As Odd Bodkins became increasingly political, O'Neill feared that the Chronicle, which held the strip's copyright, would fire him and hire another artist. He decided on an odd tactic: he would engage in copyright infringement, which he reasoned would force the paper to surrender the strip's copyright back to him. O'Neill worked the Walt Disney characters Mickey Mouse and Pluto into the strip. In 1969, the Chronicle fired O'Neill.
O'Neill decided to get rich as an underground comic book mogul, and gathered other young, inexperienced artists into a collective called The Air Pirates. Members included Bobby London, Gary Hallgren, Shary Flenniken and Ted Richards. The first issue of Air Pirates Funnies was published in July, 1971, the second issue in August. Members of the collective emulated the styles of past masters of the comic strip -- Flenniken chose George McManus' Bringing Up Father for her Trots & Bonnie comics; London's strip Dirty Duck paid homage to the styles of E.C. Segar's Thimble Theater and George Herriman's Krazy Kat; Richard's Dopin Dan was similar to Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey; while O'Neill and Hallgren focused on Walt Disney characters, most notably Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse newspaper strip. O'Neill insisted it would dilute the parody to change the names of the characters, so his adventurous mouse character was called "Mickey". O'Neill was so eager to be sued by Disney that he had copies of Air Pirates Funnies smuggled into a Walt Disney Company board meeting by the son of a board member. By late 1971, he got his wish.
Accurately telling the story of Disney's lawsuit against the Air Pirates is difficult, due to the conflicting memories of the litigants, as well as O'Neill's penchant for exaggeration. However, it is fair to say that all through the trial, O'Neill was defiant. To raise money for the Air Pirates defense fund, he and other underground cartoonists began selling original artwork -- predominately of Disney characters -- at comic conventions. In 1978, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Air Pirates three to zero. In 1979 the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.
In the midst of the lawsuit, O'Neill travelled to Ireland and Wounded Knee South Dakota, where he pioneered the genre of comic strip journalism with The Penny-Ante Republican, a four-page, single-sheet comic which sold for one cent, and which told stories of O'Neill's experiences with the Irish Republican Army and the American Indian Movement. For this work, the 11th international Congress of Cartoonists and Animators presented him with the Yellow Kid Award in 1976.
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. ("Doing something stupid once" he said, "is just plain stupid. Doing something stupid twice is a philosophy.") O'Neill's four-page Mickey Mouse story Communiqué #1 from the M.L.F. (Mouse Liberation Front) appeared in the magazine Co-Evolution Quarterly #21 in 1979. Disney asked the court to hold O'Neill in contempt of court and to have him prosecuted criminally. By mid-1979, O'Neill recruited diverse artists for an M.L.F. art show, displayed in Philadelphia and San Diego. With the help of sympathetic Disney double-agents, O'Neill delivered The M.L.F. Communique #2 in person to the Disney studios, where he posed drawing Mickey Mouse at an animation table and allegedly smoked a marijuana cigarette in the late Walt Disney's office. In 1980, weighing the obviously unrecoverable $2,000,000 in legal fees against O'Neill's continuing disregard for the court's decisions, the Walt Disney Company settled the case, though the terms of the agreement remain hazy.
In Bob Levine's 2003 book The Pirates and The Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture, New York Law School professor Edward Samuels said, "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. However, Samuels said of the Air Pirates, "They set parody back twenty years."
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