Bobby London
| Bobby London | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 29, 1950 Brooklyn, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Area(s) | Cartoonist, Artist |
|
Notable works
|
Dirty Duck Merton of the Movement Air Pirates collective Popeye comic strip |
| Spouse(s) | Shary Flenniken (div.; m. c. 1972–1976) |
Bobby London (born June 29, 1950 in Brooklyn) is an American underground comix and mainstream comics artist. His style evokes the work of early American cartoonists like George Herriman and Elzie Crisler Segar.
As a child, London was "pen pals" with comedian Stan Laurel, who provided critiques on London's youthful cartoons. His first professional cartooning was for the left-wing National Guardian in the late 1960s. He created his underground newspaper comic strip Merton, in New York in 1969. He also drew cartoons for Rat Subterranean News before moving to the West Coast.
The nucleus of the Air Pirates collective began to form in c. 1970 when London met Ted 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 Merton of the Movement [Last Gasp's "Cocoanut Comix" imprint, Oct. 1972].) In 1970 London and Richards attended the Sky River Rock Festival at Washougal, Washington, and met Shary Flenniken and Dan O'Neill at the media booth, where Flenniken was producing a daily Sky River newsletter on a mimeograph machine. Before the festival was over the four of them produced a four-page tabloid comic, Sky River Funnies, mostly drawn by London.
In early 1971 O'Neill invited Flenniken and Richards, along with London and Gary Hallgren, a Seattle cartoonist they had met at the festival, to San Francisco to form the Air Pirates collective. The Air Pirates lived together in a warehouse on Harrison Street in San Francisco, where London and Flenniken began a relationship that turned into a short-lived marriage.
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