Air Pirates On Line

August 5, 2005 5:21 PM

Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirates Funnies. The book on the ensuing legal fracas was previously discussed on Metafilter here, but now you can read the whole first issue as Dan O'Neill intended it. See also the Communique. Via BoingBoing
posted by Eothele (8 comments total)

First post. I've erroneously implied that Dan O'Neill did the whole thing, but actually there were four or five other pirates working with/under/in spite of him. So there y'ar.
posted by Eothele at 5:33 PM on August 5, 2005

Awesome. Art and creativity prevail, despite the culture hijackers. The Internet wins again.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:11 PM on August 5, 2005

Already removed the first page for excessive bandwidth usage. Sigh. BoingBoingified.

I see Bobby London about once a month or so at our cartoonist's meeting. Really cool guy. He's always got great stories about doing Air Pirates and other underground stuff; I'm sure you'd find that he did a lot of the work on this. I'll ask him, I should see him next week.

Weird childhood event: After my mom dumped Stepdad #1, who was a counter-culture hippie Columbia grad Lampoon-reader type, one day I happened to look in my box of comics, Mad mags and collectible cards, and I found that some new reading matter had been added: one copy each of Air Pirates, Mr. Natural, and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

I was 12 years old, I think. Quite an eye-opener, these comics! I wonder what Stepdad #1 was trying to do, giving such subversive stuff to a kid??

Of course I still have them. In the Air Pirates book, there's a Dirty Duck story where a girl goes to a Dead concert, but is caught by the cops as she tries to sneak in. There is a scuffle, wherein she kicks one cop's gun by accident, and it goes off and blows his head off. The story ends on a cliffhanger - The other cop arrests Dirty Duck for the killing, but says he can get off if he rats on the girl.

For years and years, I wanted to read what happened next, to find out how Dirty got out of the jam and what happened to the patchouli girl... so I asked Bobby, and he said...

"... oh yeah, I never did an ending story for that."

I guess I'll just have to make one up myself... :)
posted by zoogleplex at 6:17 PM on August 5, 2005

I'll shamelessy self-link because we've got more links over at Drawn!
posted by Robot Johnny at 7:06 PM on August 5, 2005

I long for the day when we never see the phrase "via BoingBoing" on the front page again.
posted by crunchland at 7:47 PM on August 5, 2005

<img src=http://files.bangshang.com/generator.php?wrap=true&text=Via+BoingBoing&submit=Generate
posted by parallax7d at 10:13 PM on August 5, 2005

posted by parallax7d at 10:14 PM on August 5, 2005

Thanks for the links to the scans. I've seen the comix but never owned it.

Some of the Air Pirates went on to contribute to The National Lampoon. Shary Flenniken (who appeared in The Tortoise and the Hare, No. 1 and was married to Bobby "Dirty Duck" London) wrote and drew the excellent "Trots and Bonnie" strip.

"Trots and Bonnie" was the precuror to "Calvin and Hobbs" except that Bonnie was a pubsent female trying to grow up in ultra liberal enviroment while Calvin was a 9 yo boy with politics free parents.

I wish there were definitive collections off "Trots and Bonnie" or "Dirty Duck".

It seems that somebody else owns the copyright and the authors have lost the right to publish their works.
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 11:05 PM on August 5, 2005