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They fought the Mouse and the Mouse won... but at what price victory?
The first comprehensive book about the most celebrated and misunderstood First Amendment controversy of the late 20th Century, "The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture" chronicles the groundbreaking litigation between the Disney entertainment empire and a group of rag-tag underground cartoonists who called themselves the Air Pirates.
In the late 1960's, the Walt Disney Company dominated the pop culture landscape. A group of talented underground comix cartoonists decided that the culture's salvation required the destruction of Walt Disney; to that end, they proceeded to publish a series of quasi-pornographic, satirical comic books starring the company's most famous characters. Disney sued, and the resulting litigation marked forever the significant and impassable boundaries that divide two different, competing visions of America.
Illustrated with extremely rare examples of the Air Pirates' satirical takes on Mickey Mouse, et al., Bob Levin's heartbreaking trip through an amazing time and place in recent US history delves into the outsized personalities, dissects the legal issues, and critically confronts the works of art at the heart of the fabled Air Pirates controversy.
"The definitive history of this wonderful, mad (and, I believe, significant) episode in American popular culture." -- Richard Milner, Senior Editor at Natural History magazine.
Published by Fantagraphics Books. 266 pages, black and white, dust cover. |
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