[1] Founded by Dan O'Neill, the group also included Bobby London, Shary Flenniken, Gary Hallgren, and Ted Richards.
[2] The lead stories in both issues of Air Pirates Funnies (published by Last Gasp in July & August 1971), created by O'Neill, London, and Hallgren, focused on Walt Disney characters, most notably from Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, with the Disney characters engaging in adult behaviors such as sex and drug consumption.
Ted Richards took on the Big Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs, opening up a second wave of parody attacking Disney's appropriation of European (and American) folklore.
On October 21, 1971, Disney filed a lawsuit against O'Neill, Hallgren, London and Richards (Flenniken had not contributed to the parody stories).
The nucleus of the Air Pirates collective began to form in late 1969-early 1970, when London met Richards at the office of the Berkeley Tribe, an underground newspaper where both were staff cartoonists.
(London later drew a highly fictionalized account of their experiences at the Tribe in his story "Why Bobby Seale is Not Black" in the Air Pirates' comic Merton of the Movement.
London went back to San Francisco with O'Neil and started working with him, contributing a "basement" strip to Odd Bodkins.
In early 1971 O'Neill invited Flenniken, Richards, and Hallgren to San Francisco to form the Air Pirates collective.
[6] The Air Pirates lived together in a warehouse on Harrison Street in San Francisco,[7] where London and Flenniken began a relationship that turned into a short-lived marriage.
To raise money for the Air Pirates Defense Fund, O'Neill and other underground cartoonists sold original artwork – predominantly of Disney characters – at comic book conventions.