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Pot-bellied surfer-slacker cartoon figure created by San Diego artist Michael Dormer in 1959; later turned into a 

 statue at WindanSea. "People still love Hot Curl." California Surf Museum cofounder Jane Schmauss said in 2019. "He's a physical manifestation of surfers having fun, not taking themselves too seriously, and just being fringe animals of society."

Dormer was born in Los Angeles (1935), raised in San Diego, and while living in San Francisco in the mid-'50s fell in with Beat movement headliners like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Back in San Diego, Dormer was a poet, club comic, fine artist, gallery owner, and publisher of a short-lived counterculture art magazine called 

While Dormer himself was just an occasional surfer, he identified with the sport's anti-establishment ethos and channeled it perfectly into Hot Curl, a shirtless stringy-haired knobby-kneed surfer whose trunks are held up with a length of rope. Beaky nose aside, Hot Curl has no visible facial features, which helped make him an "every surfer" figure. Hot Curl and the people he interacts with are artistically styled after the characters in the then-popular 

 both disappeared after just a few issues, and Dormer spent the next few years living and working in Pennsylvania and New York. In 1963, Dormer and close friend Lee Teacher, working in the Ocean Beach backyard of renowned sculptor Donal Hord, created a six-foot 400-pound Hot Curl sculpture out of iron bars, water pipes, chicken wire, paper mache, and plaster. This version of Hot Curl, unlike the one who appeared in 

, held a can of beer in his left hand. In April of that year, with the help of a half-dozen local surfers and working under cover of night, Dormer carried the statue to a sandstone point overlooking the break at Windansea, in La Jolla, and cemented it in place next to the famous Windansea palm-frond shack.

City workers demolished the statue six days later, claiming it was unsafe. La Jolla locals protested—surfers and non-surfers alike—the much-respected Windansea Surf Club got involved, as did the US Surfing Association, and within weeks the city of La Jolla agreed to permit a replacement. On July 14, with local media in attendance, a second Hot Curl statue was installed. On July 27, vandals knocked the statue off its pedestal and removed the head.

Hot Curl returned as a comic strip character in the 

 magazine, which in turn led to decals and T-shirts, and a plastic Hot Curl model kit (spinoff models included "Curl's Gurl" and "Hot Shot"). In 1964's 

 cast members can be seen cavorting in Hot Curl gear, and Hot Curl himself is featured in the opening credits, which were illustrated by Dormer.

Dormer did the artwork for the 1966 World Surfing Championships poster; the following year he created 

, a campy mostly ad-libbed live-action daily children's TV show with middling ratings but huge cache among in-crowd Los Angeles-area teens and adults.

Starting in 2007, nearly 50 years after its debut, the Hot Curl cartoon strip had a brief run in SURFER Magazine.

In years to come, Dormer and Ed "Big Daddy" Roth were sometimes cited as precursors to the Lowbrow Art movement.

Michael Dormer and the Legend of Hot Curl

Hot Curl

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

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Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features