Dirty Duck (comix character)

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For other uses of the title "Dirty Duck", see Dirty Duck.

Dirty Duck is an underground comic strip created by Bobby London. London's best known character, Dirty Duck first appeared in one of the most notorious undergrounds of all, Air Pirates Funnies. London contributed 12 of the 36 pages of Air Pirates #1 (July, 1971), and the bulk of his contribution consisted of Dirty Duck. This has led to a popular but erroneous belief that Dirty was included in the famous lawsuit by which Disney sank the Air Pirates.

London later said Dirty's character was distilled from several actual human beings he was familiar with. There was a certain amount of Groucho Marx in him, but he mostly came from non-famous people whom London had encountered over the years, including an old derelict who used to sell pencils on a street corner in San Francisco. He also got some of his inspiration as a child, watching real ducks at play and thinking how little they resembled anything he saw in cartoons.

Dirty Duck was about as commercial a character as ever came out of the Air Pirates studio, at least if you exclude characters that already belonged to others. Within a few months, he had his own title, the single issue of which kept the studio afloat during a lean period. By 1972, London was producing Dirty Duck pages for National Lampoon, and in '77 he took the feature to Playboy, which still runs it.

In 1975, New World Pictures released an animated film called Dirty Duck, calling the character "madder than Daffy, dumber than Donald, more existential than Howard". But this was an unrelated character created by Charles Swenson, and starring Flo & Eddie (Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan).