Origins
The original nucleus of the Air Pirates collective began to form when Bobby London met Ted Richards at the office of the Berkeley Tribe, an underground newspaper where both were staff cartoonists. London later drew a highly fictionalized account of their experiences at the Tribe in his story "Why Bobby Seale is Not Black" in Merton of the Movement. In 1970 they attended the Sky River Rock Festival near Portland, Oregon and met Shary Flenniken and Dan O'Neill at the media booth, where Flenniken was producing a daily Sky River newsletter on a mimeograph machine. Before the festival was over the four of them produced a 4-page tabloid comic, Sky River Funnies, mostly drawn by London. After the festival Flenniken and Richards went to Seattle, where Flenniken was doing graphics for the Seattle Liberation Front's brief-lived underground newspaper, Sabot. London went back with O'Neill, who had a studio and a syndicated strip in San Francisco, and started working with him, contributing a "basement" strip to O'Neill's syndicated Odd Bodkins. In early 1971 they invited Flenniken and Richards, along with Gary Hallgren, a Seattle cartoonist who had met O'Neill at the festival, to San Francisco to form the Air Pirates collective.
After the Pirates were established, Willy Murphy, Larry Todd and Gary King started hanging around the collective and contributing to their projects, missing the original Air Pirates Funnies but appearing in later Air Pirates comics like Merton of the Movement and Left Field Funnies. Along with these projects the Pirates also released Dan O'Neill's Comics and Stories, a Bobby London Dirty Duck collection, and a Dopin' Dan book with side stories by other members of the collective. A Flenniken Trots and Bonnie comic was announced, but never released. Most of these comics were distributed through Last Gasp, some with a "Cocoanut Comics" logo on the cover.
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smiling carves dreams, bright cells
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—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
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