2006 January 9 created
2006 February 3 updated
2006 January 9 created
2006 February 3 updated
“Dan O'Neill -- I [Ed Stephan] recruited Hugh Daniel O'Neill III as cartoonist when I edited The Foghorn, USF's newspaper. He was the primary impetus behind the Highgraders. For several years he had a cartoon strip, Odd Bodkins, syndicated through the SF Chronicle. It lampooned the phone company, Smokey the Bear, everything. He published three books I know of: Buy This Book of Odd Bodkins, The Collective Unconscience of Odd Bodkins, and Hear the Sound of My Feet Walking... Drown the Sound of My Voice Talking. Later on he got in trouble with Disney Corp when he did some pornographic comics - Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirates. That case went to the U.S. Supreme Court and is still referred to as Mickey Mouse libel law. I was best man at Danny's first wedding (to Becky) the day after President Kennedy was assassinated.
[from ==> http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/Brushes/es.brushes.html]
Free Mickey
By Jeet Heer
Boston Globe Ideas — September 23, 2003SINCE HIS ONSCREEN debut in 1928, Mickey Mouse has been an icon of childhood innocence. But in recent years, the famous rodent has also found himself at the center of a contentious debate over the reach of copyright law. In 1998, the Walt Disney Corporation and other entertainment giants successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which delayed the entrance of creative works into the public domain until up to 70 years after their creator's death. Derided as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act and challenged in the courts on First Amendment and other grounds, the law was upheld by the Supreme Court last January. (There have been similar moves to extend the domain of Canadian copyright laws).
But this was not the first time Mickey's corporate handlers had sought to keep him on a tight leash. In the 1970s, the underground cartoonist Dan O'Neill risked a life-destroying lawsuit and jail time when he published a series of raunchy Mickey-taunting comics. Along the way, O'Neill recruited scores of followers into two of the wackiest groups to emerge from the counterculture of the 1970s: the Air Pirates and the Mouse Liberation Front.
Throughout the proceedings of Walt Disney Productions v. The Air Pirates, which raged from 1971 to 1979, the courts showed little sympathy to the free-speech arguments made by O'Neill and his merry band. One judge after another dismissed the idea that the Air Pirates deserved First Amendment protection until the Supreme Court finally refused to hear their case. To add insult to injury, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy later described the Air Pirates in passing as "profiteers who [did] no more than . . . place the characters from a familiar work in novel or eccentric poses."
But to their fans, the Air Pirates were free-speech martyrs and innovative artists who were unfairly penalized simply because they worked in the popular but disdained medium of the comic book. "The judges deciding this case were all pretty much 60 years old or older," notes San Francisco lawyer Bob Levin, whose new book "The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Underground" (Fantagraphics) provides a lively reexamination of the case. "Their whole take on comic books was to think of them as trash, not as anything of significance. If the same thing had been going on in a different medium -- in the visual arts, literature, or cinema -- [the Air Pirates] probably would have gotten a more respectful hearing."
In a vivid narrative that combines the gonzo counter-cultural sensibility of Hunter Thompson with the forensic courtroom drama found in a John Grisham legal thriller, Levin demonstrates the how the Air Pirates case stands at the centre of raging battle over the ownership of ideas. Simply put, Bob Levin has written one of the best researched and most compelling books ever devoted to cartooning history. . . .
To understand the Air Pirates, you have to start with ringleader Dan O'Neill. Born in Virginia in 1942, O'Neill was a lifelong troublemaker. As a teenager, he shut down his Oakland high school for two weeks when he pumped 4 million cubic feet of ferrous sulphide through the ventilation system. (Black Panther leader Huey Newton, a schoolmate, would later tell him, "God, that was the only vacation I had in my life.") When he wasn't wreaking havoc, O'Neill was drawing cartoons. After working on several alternative papers, he sold his daily comic strip "Odd Bodkins" to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1963, when he was 21. The strip was soon syndicated to scores of newspapers around the country (including The Boston Globe), making O'Neill the youngest syndicated newspaper cartoonist in history.
With its misshapen animals and fantastic creatures waxing metaphysical, "Odd Bodkins" gained a cult following as a trippy version of "Pogo" or "Peanuts." When O'Neill started the strip, Levin writes, the Chronicle gave him three simple rules: "No religion, no politics, and no sex in the strip." But O'Neill, who hung out with Lenny Bruce and other fixtures on the underground comedy scene, was undaunted. Using hippie slang, Morse code messages, and other subterfuges, he began peppering his strip with comments about the Vietnam War and the drug culture. Increasingly the strip featured distorted versions of all-American icons -- Abraham Lincoln, the Lone Ranger, and a grungy-looking Mickey Mouse -- traipsing across a surreal landscape, often with suspicious cigarettes in their mouths.
As "Odd Bodkins" became more pointed in its political messages and loopier in its psychedelic humor, it began losing newspapers. Even the free-spirited San Francisco Chronicle finally dropped the strip in 1970, despite a torrent of reader protest. O'Neill blamed his troubles on the fact that American popular culture had become too saccharine and namby-pamby -- a problem he traced to Walt Disney's rigid code of cuteness, epitomized by his winsome mouse.
Exiled from the newspaper page, O'Neill plunged into the burgeoning world of underground comics, where bohemian artists like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton were producing work that was like raw id on paper. Printed by ad-hoc publishers and distributed largely through head shops (hippie boutiques specializing in drug paraphernalia), these cartoons suffered from none of the restrictions imposed on mainstream efforts.
In 1971, O'Neill organized the Air Pirates -- a group of young cartoonists named for villains who had battled Mickey Mouse in the 1930s. Gary Hallgren, a sign painter from Seattle, and Bobby London, a high school dropout from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, were master mimics of classic cartoon styles. Shary Flenniken, an admiral's daughter, had enlivened many underground comics with her wry, feminist humor. Ted Richards, kicked out of the military for smoking pot, had created Dopin' Dan, a Beetle Bailey-type who tokes up.
The Air Pirates began producing a string of satirical comic books from their communal live-in studio in San Francisco, along with hashish-inspired schemes for selling them. "One involved dropping comic books from blimps. Another was to hire winos to dress as policemen and sell them on street corners," Flenniken told The Comics Journal in 1991. Most of these schemes evaporated when the pot smoke cleared.
In 1971, the group released their most controversial comics, "Air Pirates Funnies" nos. 1 and 2, in print runs of 15,000-20,000 copies, under the aegis of Hell Comics. The highlights were stories that showed Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters in distinctly unsavory situations. But for all the references to sadomasochism and drugs, the Air Pirates' work was fairly mild compared with other underground comics of the era, which tended to feature disturbing tableaux of mangled bodies and orgies. By contrast, "Air Pirates Funnies" were impeccably drawn to imitate the warm and gangly style of the Mickey Mouse strips of the early 1930s (those strips were drawn by a cartoonist named Floyd Gottfredson, although always credited to Disney).
Why did the Air Pirates do it? "Throughout my childhood, Mickey Mouse was used as a placebo to lull me into thinking everything was all right," Bobby London later noted in a court deposition. "But I found the happy-ever-after world of Walt and Mickey Mouse to be a poor half-truth. 'Air Pirates Funnies' shows that Mickey doesn't always win."
O'Neill was certainly spoiling for a fight. When his comics met with no response, he had a friend -- the son of the chairman of Disney's board of directors -- sneak copies into a board meeting and lay them out. Disney filed suit against the Air Pirates, charging them with copyright infringement.
While the lawyers for the Air Pirates compared their clients to satirists like Swift and Fielding, Disney's accused them of producing "obscene nonsense" designed "to degrade and disparage all that Disney has done." Disney was particularly upset at the fact that the Air Pirates were repeat offenders. Unlike the underground paper The Realist (which had famously tweaked the mouse in a 1967 centerfold called "Walt Disney Memorial Orgy"), the Air Pirates didn't just publish a one-off, but apparently intended to continue with the anti-Disney theme.
In 1975, Disney won nearly $200,000 in damages and a restraining order against O'Neill, who was mocking Disney by continuing to draw Mickey Mouse every chance he got.
Four years later, when O'Neill was fined and jailed for violating the injunction, the Mouse Liberation Front was formed. Its members harried Disney by flooding comic book conventions with anonymous bootleg Mickey Mouse cartoons, which they auctioned off to pay the Air Pirates' legal expenses.
Faced with the prospect of infringement on such a massive scale, Disney finally reached a settlement with O'Neill. Disney dropped the contempt charge and the damage judgment, and O'Neill agreed not to "mouse it up any more." By some estimates, Disney spent $2 million to achieve this result. . . .
The Air Pirates might have battled Disney to a draw, but why were the courts so unsympathetic to their free-speech claims? Wendy Gordon, a legal scholar at Boston University who specializes in copyright issues, believes their playfulness did the Air Pirates no favors.
"People communicate not only through rational, logical sentences," she notes. "They also use entertainment, shared experiences, intuitions. But the court gave the spirit of play no space to wiggle its toe."
Also working against the Air Pirates was the long-standing legal and cultural prejudice against comics, argues Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a Northampton-based nonprofit established in 1987 to help cartoonists and retailers fight for free-speech protection.
The prejudice against comic books, argues Brownstein, dates back to the Kefauver Senate Subcommittee Hearings of 1954, which blamed horror comics for the problem of juvenile delinquency. Comics began gaining ground as a legitimate art form in the 1980s, when adult-oriented works like Art Spiegelman's "Maus" won a wide mainstream audience. But legal progress has only come more recently. In an important case decided earlier this year, the California Supreme Court ruled that "Jonah Hex" comics' notorious portrayal of the musical duo the Winter Brothers as the spawn of a giant subterranean worm was protected under the First Amendment. . . .
Echoes of the case live on in the recent court skirmishes over literary parodies like "The Wind Done Gone" and even in the raging battle over the downloading of movies and music over the Internet. But these days, the Air Pirates themselves have largely settled into comfortable careers. Bobby London and Gary Hallgren, ironically, found jobs working for Disney in the 1980s before resuming freelance work. Shary Flenniken served a long stint as the main cartoonist for National Lampoon. Ted Richards now works as a computer executive in Silicon Valley. As for Dan O'Neill, a few years ago he resumed drawing "Odd Bodkins," which runs in alternative city weeklies along the West Coast.
There are still those, even in the freewheeling world of underground cartoonists, who believe that by trampling on copyright the Air Pirates simply went too far. "I own my work and I don't want to be ripped off," says the San Francisco-based feminist cartoonist Trina Robbins, mastermind behind Wimmen's Comix. "Dan O'Neill owns `Odd Bodkins' just like Disney owns Mickey Mouse. It doesn't matter that Disney is a big corporation and Dan O'Neill is one guy. Copyright laws apply to everyone."
In upholding Congress's copyright extension, the Supreme Court has guaranteed Disney's lock on Mickey until the year 2023. But the Air Pirates' comics, which now fetch prices in the $100 range, retain an unexpected freshness. Unlike most hippie artifacts, the strips -- with their uncanny stylistic echoes of the golden age of cartooning -- haven't aged. Although enemies in the courtroom, the satirists and their target are bound together in a shared aesthetic.
Sunday, 2005 May 23
Odd Bodkins turns 43Dan O’Neill’s celebrated comic strip, Odd Bodkins, turns 43 this year [2005].
It is one of, if not the, longest-running counterculture strip in the
U.S. funny papers and he is a genuine character in his own right.O’Neill’s outrageous parodies and politically pointed wit got him in hot water,
and he fell from grace with the powers that be at big corporate papers
like the San Francisco Chronicle, the flagship paper of his popular strip.
Books have been written about his cause celebre.
The Pirates and the Mouse by Bob Levin tells the story of how O’Neill took on Disney, and won. It is summarized here.
After all these years, O’Neill is still at large in Nevada City, still using a pen to fan the flames of justice and still having a good time with it.
He is also also doing some new things, among them creating a separate musical world on the radio on KVMR, 89.5 FM.
There, he and other musicians create the imaginary world of the End of the Trail Saloon, where anyone with a sense of humor and some intelligence can drop by. If you’re thinking Duffy’s Tavern, fuhgetaboutit.
Dan O’Neill will tell us all about it as a guest on Left Turn on Bird Street at 9 a.m. Monday.
# posted : 5:37 PM
[ from ==> http://www.ltobs.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_ltobs_archive.html ]
Terence Chua (b. October 19, 1970), full name Terence Chua Seng Leng (Chinese: ???; Hanyu Pinyin: Cài Chénglóng) is a Deputy Registrar and Magistrate of the Singapore Subordinate Courts. A former criminal prosecutor, he is also known as a composer and performer of filk music....He was eventually awarded a Master of Arts in American History in May 2005. The title of his Master's thesis is “Messing with the Mouse": Copyright, Parody and the Countercultural Wars in Walt Disney v. The Air Pirates.” He returned to Singapore to resume working at the Subordinate Courts in July 2005.
The Illustrated Story of Copyright
How Dan O'Neill "won" the Air Pirates case
(p. 198 of the book)Anyone wanting the definitive story of Dan O’Neill and the Air Pirates should read the detailed two-part account by attorney Bob Levin, “Showdown: The Pirate and the Mouse,” printed in The Comics Journal, issues 236 and 239, August and November, 2001. It's got lots of pictures of O'Neill's work, including images from Air Pirates. I’m told that it will eventually be expanded into a book; it’s incredibly informative and entertaining as is. The reference to me is reprinted at the end of this note.
I had obtained the permission of Disney Enterprises to reprint the Disney images and the O'Neill parodies involved in the Air Pirates case, and didn't believe I had to obtain the permission of the defendants who were found to have infringed. Nevertheless, I thought it would be interesting to track down Dan O'Neill and get his side of the story. After some searching on the Internet, I finally reached him by phone in California.
I told O'Neill that the case was a major one on the issue of fair use in copyright, and was included in many of the leading treatises and casesbooks.
He replied that he felt particularly proud at beating Disney, and that the case was a major victory for freelance cartoonists. The conversation continued something like this:
ED: Uh, Dan, the case is in the casebooks because you got clobbered. How was it a victory for you?
DAN: There are two main ways. First, I didn't actually go to jail.
ED: That's not exactly a victory, Dan. Most people don't go to jail, and they don't exactly consider that a victory.
DAN: Well, I was the one who nearly went to Leavenworth. When they came after me, I contacted my cartoonist buddies and started a campaign called the Mouse Liberation Front. I'm only one artist, but I got 1,000 artists to each do one, thirty tons of art appeared in days. Disney was trying to get me for contempt of court. The judge was quite interesting, he told me he thought they had a case, and strongly urged me to settle. Finally Disney surrendered, about as I was to be hauled off to the federal penitentiary, and signed a peace treaty with the Mouse Liberation Front.
ED: Okay, so you didn't go to jail. You said two ways, how else was the case a victory for you?
DAN: Well, back in the '70s, I had a strip called Odd Bodkins. It was real successful, it was picked up by the syndicate. But then it got too controversial for them, and they wanted to withdraw it. I wanted to publish a book of the strip, and I discovered that they actually owned the copyright! I was just a young kid, and I didn't realize they owned the strip, not me. Then I figured out how to get them to give it back.
ED: Yes? How did you do that?
DAN: Well, I started putting Disney characters into the strip. At first it was just a few in the background, but it ended up being 28 Disney characters in the strip.
ED: [Pause.] Yes?
DAN: Then there was Air Pirates. And when Disney came after me, I told the syndicate that since they owned the strip, the suit should be against them. They would have to defend against Disney.
ED: [Pause.] Yes?
DAN: Well, they gave it back. So now I own Odd Bodkins, and I'm still writing it, and I've got a website and everything.
ED: [Long pause.] You mean to tell me that your using the Disney characters was all just a ploy to get back your own creation?
DAN: Of course.
ED: And you mean to tell me that you knew from the beginning, and that's why you did it?
DAN: Yes. But that's my story, that's my book. Don't write that book.
ED: [Long pause.] Don't worry, that's not what my book is about. There's just a mention of Air Pirates, but my book is about copyright.
DAN: Well, maybe your book will promote mine, and maybe mine will promote yours.
ED: I really hope you write that book, Dan, it would certainly be interesting.
I have no way of knowing if O'Neill was as in control of the situation as he seemed to believe. However, I did start buying some of the Odd Bodkins books. Not only are they brilliant, but they do indeed have little images of Disney characters, sometimes just in hints (like in a cloud formation), sometimes more prominent. And the rights to Odd Bodkins are now owned by Dan O'Neill himself. Visit his website at www.danoneillcomics.com/. Among other things, you'll find under "crimes" his "Communiqué," a hilarious four-page "explanation" of fair use in the context of the Air Pirates case. (What you see is a poor low-resolution image: track down a better copy, if you can, from an issue of the Co-evolution Quarterly.)
Here's how the above account ended up in Bob Levin's article in The Comics Journal. (In this account, "I" refers to Bob Levin, the author of the article.)
For [a legal judgment] I required objective, outside, expert help.
Edward Samuels, a professor at New York Law School, has taught Disney vs. Air Pirates for 25 years. Recently, while finalizing his The Illustrated Story of Copyright, he had tracked down and spoken with O’Neill and O’Neill had recommended him to me as someone who could authenticate the significance of his litigation.
Actually, O’Neill had told me his name was “Levine” and that he taught at New York University Law School, a different institution entirely. After the dozen misdirected phone calls this misdirection necessitated, I knew I had the right fellow when, recalling their conversation, his voice took on the starry-eyed, wobble-kneed affect of someone who has stepped off the merry-go-round just after it had been floored. “I was flabbergasted,” Samuels said. “He told me he had won the case. ‘No, Dan,’ I told him, ‘you lost.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I won.’ ‘No, you lost.’” There was a pause while I imagined the professor wishing for the steadier terrain of first-year students and The Rule in Shelly’s Case. “They set parody back 20 years.”
“But do you think the court’s decision was correct?” I said.
“It was absolutely correct. Even today, when the pendulum has swung back in favor of parody, I don’t think the result would be any different. This wasn’t MAD. This wasn’t Weird Al. They went far beyond the acceptable, and they would have kept going too far until they got the response they wanted. They lifted specific frames and story lines practically literally from the original books. They defamed Mickey Mouse. It was part of the culture then. People going too far. People pushing the envelope. They made damn good comics, and reading them gave you the thrill of being a co-conspirator; but did they go too far, yeah.”
[from ==> http://www.edwardsamuels.com/copyright/about/anecdotes/oneill.html ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Odd Bodkins book by Dan O'NeillUNDERGROUND COMICS
Glide Urban Center Publications, San Francisco, 1969. First Edition. Soft cover, oversized, 13x10". Minor scuffing of cover from normal wear, no damage, binding is tight, pages clean. Buyer satisfaction is fully guaranteed.Dan O'Neill, a San Francisco underground cartoonist during the hippie 60's, went "mainstream" briefly when the San Francisco Chronicle began running his cartoon strip, "Odd Bodkins". A surge of popularity followed, he got syndicated in some 50 newspapers around the country, but his humor proved too insulting for most, and as quickly as it appeared it got dropped by all but 5 or 6 papers and the Chronicle fired him.
After that, he turned to satirizing Disney characters. Disney sued, and the case went on for over a decade before Disney won a huge judgment against O'Neill, who has yet to pay it.
In 1969, shortly after getting fired by the Chronicle and before being sued by Disney, Glide invited O'Neill to "make his own statement about what is happening and how he feels about it." This book is the result of that invitation, a collection of cartoon stories that explore the nature of God, man, and everything in between.
Some of the stories, or chapters, if one prefers to read the stories as a continuum:
God is a Rock. The hero, after reading that God is everywhere, thinks he has found God living under a rock, but it is only a snake named Lulu. Didn't Eve make a similar mistake? Or is God a snake? Hey, that rhymes!
100% American Dog. A roadside dog bites a Conservative and gets infected by the true religion.
Bat-Winged Hamburger Snatcher. Our hero gets knocked out when a hamburger falls from heaven. When he regains consciousness, he is certain the Hamburger is here to rule the Earth. Skeptics, however, question the "inner nature of the American hamburger".
The Mad Tickler. Old Hugh talks to himself while making a semantic search for God. He gets hung up with the concept of a "Non-Tickler". Even St. Thomas Aquinas would have trouble with that one.
Love is a Many Splendored Thing. A monster eats up LOVE (a big sign on life's highway) while the Sun and Moon argue and a literary man lives in a bottle because he wishes to protect American Womanhood from his rabbit-like desires. The Gingerbread Man runs along the highway of life into violence. Life is energy, like war. Being loved means being chained, and the more people love you the more likely you will be chained to death. And Outer Space is groovey.
Great Hoo Hoo. The Great One in the Sky has spoken: there really are Magic Cookies.
100% American Dog and the Magic Cookie. All the previous stories sort of come together to make no sense whatsoever.
One series of panels suggests O'Neill's future problems when he has Mickey Mouse with a machine gun killing a Dirty Commie Jewish Monolithic Hippy Anarchist. Behind him Hitler, looking a bit like Walt Disney, encourages him with shouts of "Kill! Kill!"
Most of the panels are only partially colored (readers are urged to use their own felt markers) but the climatic finale is in full color. See scan below.
Hard-to-find first edition of a classic 1960's underground comic. (Still entertaining, still relevant.) Nice collector's item, listed in some guides at over $200.
[from eBay ==> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7005827910&fromMakeTrack=true]
