Dan O'Neill

Dan O'Neill (born April 21, 1942) is a cartoonist, creator of the syndicated comic strip Odd Bodkins and the underground comic book Air Pirates Funnies.

Odd Bodkins began its run in 1964 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 his critique of 1960s counterculture. 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. The Chronicle had axed Odd Bodkins a few times already, but it had been reinstated following reader protests. O'Neill decided on an odd tactic to regain control of his strip: he would engage in copyright infringement, which he reasoned would force the paper to surrender the strip's copyright back to him for fear of being sued. O'Neill worked 28 Walt Disney characters, including Mickey Mouse and Pluto into the strip. In late November 1970, the Chronicle fired O'Neill for the final time, but did not continue to run the strip.

O'Neill decided to get rich as 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. Members of the collective emulated the styles of past masters of the comic strip - Flenniken chose George McManus's 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. The first issue of Air Pirates Funnies was dated July, 1971, and the second issue dated August. Both were published under the Hell Comics imprint, and were distributed through Ron Turner's Last Gasp publishing company.

O'Neill and Hallgren focused on Walt Disney characters, most notably from 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 as Disney filed a lawsuit alleging, among other things, copyright infringement, trademark infringement and unfair competition against O'Neill, Hallgren, London and Richards. Disney later added Turner's name to the suit. The Pirates, in turn, claimed that the parody was fair use.

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 lawsuit, O'Neill was defiant. During the legal proceedings and in violation of the temporary restraining order, the Air Pirates published some of the material intended for the the third issue of Air Pirates Funnies in the comic The Tortoise and the Hare, of which nearly 10,000 issues were soon confiscated under a court order. After this, in 1972, the Chronicle transferred the copyright of Odd Bodkins back to O'Neill, although whether this was because of the Disney lawsuit or not is unclear. (If the Chronicle was liable because of the Odd Bodkins strips, transferring the copyright would not prevent them from being sued.)

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 would present him with the Yellow Kid Award in 1976.

The initial decision by Judge Wollenberg in the California District Court delivered on July 7, 1972 went against the Air Pirates, and O'Neill's lawyers appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. O'Neill suggested the other Pirates settle, and leave him to defend the case alone. Hallgren and Turner settled with Disney, but London and Richards decided to continuing fighting . To raise money for the Air Pirates Defense Fund, O'Neill and other underground cartoonists began selling original artwork — predominately of Disney characters — at comic conventions.

The case dragged on for several years. Finally, in 1978, the Ninth Circuit ruled against the Air Pirates three to zero for copyright infringement, although they dismissed the trademark infringement claims. In 1979 the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

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 CoEvolution Quarterly #21 in 1979. Disney asked the court to hold O'Neill in contempt of court and have him prosecuted criminally, along with Stewart Brand, publisher of CoEvolution Quarterly.

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 employees, O'Neill delivered The M.L.F. Communiqué #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 unrecoverable $190,000 in damages and $2,000,000 in legal fees against O'Neill's continuing disregard for the court's decisions, the Walt Disney Company settled the case, dropping the contempt charges and promising not to enforce the judgment as long as the Pirates no longer infringed Disney's copyrights.

Ironically, O'Neill would sue 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.

In Bob Levin'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."

O'Neill lives in Nevada City, California, where he continues to draw Odd Bodkins and is a director in the Original Sixteen to One gold mine.

Bibliography

Comic books

• Dan O'Neill's Comics and Stories Vol. 1, No. 1, 1971
• Dan O'Neill's Comics and Stories Vol. 1, No. 2, 1971
• Dan O'Neill's Comics and Stories Vol. 1, No. 3, 1971
• Dan O'Neill's Comics and Stories Vol. 2, No. 1, 1975
• Dan O'Neill's Comics and Stories Vol. 2, No. 2, 1975
• Air Pirates Funnies Vol. 1, No. 1, July 1971
• Air Pirates Funnies Vol. 1, No. 2, August 1971
• The Tortoise and the Hare No. 1, October 1971
• Air Pirates Funnies tabloid, July 1972

Collections

• Buy This Odd Bodkins Book
• Hear the Sound of My Feet Walking, Drown the Sound of My Voice Talking
• The Collected Unconscience of Odd Bodkins

References

• Levin, Bob (2003), The Pirates and The Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics Books. ISBN 156097530X.

External link

• http://Danoneillcomics.com
• Original Sixteen to One Mine, Inc. (http://origsix.com)