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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT color=#990000>That's new from
Fantagraphics</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT color=#990000></FONT></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><FONT color=#990000>The Pirates And The
Mouse<BR><FONT size=-2>Disney's War Against the
Underground</FONT></FONT><B><BR></B><FONT face=arial,helvetica,sans-serif
color=#000000 size=-1><B>Bob Levin<BR></B></FONT><FONT
face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size=2>During a time of unprecedented
political, social, and cultural upheaval in U.S. history, one of the fiercest
battles was ignited by a comic book.<BR>In 1963, the San Francisco Chronicle
made 21-year-old Dan O’Neill the youngest syndicated cartoonist in American
newspaper history. As O’Neill delved deeper into the emerging counterculture,
his strip, Odd Bodkins, became stranger and stranger and more and more
provocative, until the papers in the syndicate dropped it and the Chronicle let
him go. The lesson that O’Neill drew from this was that what America most needed
was the destruction of Walt Disney.<BR>O’Neill assembled a band of rogue
cartoonists, called the Air Pirates after a group of villains who had bedeviled
Mickey Mouse in comic books and cartoons. They lived communally in a San
Francisco warehouse owned by Francis Ford Coppola and put out a comic book, Air
Pirates Funnies, that featured Disney characters participating in very
un-Disneylike behavior, provoking a mammoth lawsuit for copyright and trademark
infringements and hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Disney was
represented by one of San Francisco’s top corporate law firms and the Pirates by
the cream of the counterculture bar. The lawsuit raged for 10 years, from the
trial court to the U.S. Supreme Court and back again.</FONT> </DIV>
<P><FONT face=arial,helvetica,sans-serif size=-1>Cloth, 270 pages<BR>$24.00
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