cover image Pirates & the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Underground

Pirates & the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Underground

Bob Levin. Fantagraphics Books, $24 (270pp) ISBN 978-1-56097-530-4

In 1971, a group of underground cartoonists known as the Air Pirates put out a comic book parody of Disney cartoons in which Mickey Mouse, Goofy, Bucky Bug and others get high, have sex and swear a blue streak. Extremely protective of its characters' reputations, Disney sued--and turned what would have been a blip on the countercultural radar screen into a First Amendment cause celebre. The result was a classic post-Vietnam kulturkampf pitting artistic license against corporate copyright, and San Francisco's bohemian debauchery against Disneyland's disciplined wholesomeness. Levin's charming and thoughtful account, complete with reproductions of some of the offending cartoons, meanders through the history of the comic book industry, the rise of Disney to domination in the cultural marketplace and the intricacies of copyright and First Amendment law around which the litigation revolved. His anecedotal, shaggy-dog style is perfect for sketching indelible portraits of the quirky, romantic, incorrigibly stoned denizens of San Francisco's underground comics scene, whose mission it was to smash every false idol of square America and whose sensibility lives on in alternative weeklies across the land. If they did, as Disney claimed, besmirch the innocence of a national icon, the Air Pirates are themselves emblems of a lost idealism, of a time when people believed that sex, drugs and revolutionary rhetoric could liberate society from the rule of corporate entertainment monoliths. B&w photos.