THE PIRATES AND THE MOUSE: Disney's War Against The Counterculture.

Seattle:: Fantagraphics,, (2003). Hardcover first edition -. Fine in fine dust jacket.. First printing. An account of one of the most ferocious copyright battles ever - "They fought the Mouse and the Mouse (eventually) won,but it was a battle that left everyone bloodied...In 1963, 21-year-old Dan O'Neill was 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. He 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 behavior, 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." Illustrated with a significant section of full-page comics in full color, black and white photographs, and comic strips in black and white, including some art from the Air Pirates archives. Bibliography, index. Printed on glossy stock throughout, illustrated endpapers. 266 pp.