Air Pirates and Disney Lawsuit
O'Neill decided to become an underground comic book mogul and gathered other young artists into a collective called the Air Pirates, whose members included Bobby London, Gary Hallgren, Shary Flenniken and Ted Richards. Their two-issue series Air Pirates Funnies included parodies of Mickey Mouse and other copyrighted characters, which led to a famous lawsuit by The Walt Disney Company. O'Neill took the lead in fighting the suit, promoting it as a free-speech case in his "Mouse Liberation Front" campaign. He and Richards were the last Air Pirates to settle with Disney after a long, highly publicized and expensive legal battle.
O'Neill sued Disney years later when it released their motion picture Who Framed Roger Rabbit, claiming that Disney had stolen his character, a drug-dealing rabbit named Roger, who appeared in a few pages in the underground magazine The Realist and was reprinted in The Tortoise and the Hare. The suit was eventually dropped.
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Famous quotes containing the words air and/or pirates:
“Having grown up in shade of Church and State
Breathing the air of drawing-rooms and scent ...”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Power first, or no leading class. In politics and trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)