R.I.P. Ted Richards

Underground comix creator Ted Richards died of lung cancer on April 21, 2023, at the age of 76. Richards was the creator of Dopin’ Dan, E.Z. Wolf, and The Forty Year Old Hippie, and he was a member of the Air Pirates collective, whose sendup of Disney comics was the subject of a long-running lawsuit.

Richards was born in Fort Bragg, NC, and his father was a member of the Green Berets, so his family moved frequently when he was a child. He moved to San Francisco in 1969, when he was 23, after serving three years in the Air Force, and quickly became part of the underground comix scene, making friends with Gilbert Shelton and Bobby London. It was during this period that Richards created Dopin’ Dan, E.Z. Wolf, and Mellow Cat, all humorous characters whose exploits were drawn in a cartoony style.

In 1970, Richards and London went to the Sky River Rock Festival in Washington state, and there they met fellow artists Shary Flenniken, who was producing a mimeographed newsletter for the 10-day festival, and Dan O’Neill. The quartet collaborated on a four-page tabloid comic, Sky River Funnies, and after they returned to San Francisco, they formed the Air Pirates Collective, with the addition of Gary Hallgren. They lived together in a warehouse in San Francisco and worked together on Air Pirates Funnies, a comics anthology that included parodies of numerous Disney properties; Richards’ contributions, “The Big Bad Wolf” and “The Three Little Pigs,” were based on Disney movies and intended as a commentary on the corporation’s appropriation of tales from folklore. Disney sued O’Neill, Hallgren, London, and Richards, claiming copyright and trademark infringement; they later added Last Gasp publisher Ron Turner as a defendant.

The Air Pirates collective was short-lived, producing a total of three comics, but the lawsuit went on for years, with the creators claiming that their comics were parodies of Disney and therefore fell under fair use. While Hallgren and Turner settled, Richards, London, and O’Neill continued with appeal after appeal, which O’Neill funded in part with more unauthorized Disney artwork. Although Disney won most of the court cases, O’Neill simply ignored the verdicts and kept on going, and eventually Disney gave up on collecting damages and agreed to settle the case as long as the Air Pirates would stop the infringing activity.

Richards continued making his own comics throughout the 1970s, including Dopin’ Dan comics, and his Ezekiel Wolf and Forty Year Old Hippie strips were syndicated by Rip Off Press, which served college and underground newspapers. He contributed to the Rip Off Comix anthology and collaborated with Willy Murphy, Gilbert Shelton, and Hallgren on Give Me Liberty, a comic about the American Revolution published to coincide with the U.S. Bicentennial. He also drew a Mellow Cat comic for Skateboard magazine from 1978 to 1981.

In 1981, Richards left comics and took a job as a software designer at the video game company Atari; from then on, he pursued a career in the software industry while only occasionally drawing comics.

Earlier this year, Richards revealed that he was suffering from small-cell lung cancer and had set up a GoFundMe campaign to help cover his medical and living costs (see “‘Air Pirates’ Artist Ted Richards Has Set Up a Fund-Raiser”).