Mike Diana

In his introduction to The Worst of Boiled Angel: A Collection of Mike Diana’s “Boiled Angel’s” #1-#8, Obscure Publications editor Jim Romeneso discusses the legal proceedings against Mike Diana in Florida where, “on March 25, 1994, a jury took just 90 minutes to find Mike guilty of three counts of publishing and distributing obscene material” (pg. 1). Judge Walter Fullerton and Assistant States Attorney Stuart Baggish wanted to make an example of Diana, particularly after they wasted their own time investigating him for recent murders in Gainesville, Florida based solely on his art, so Fullerton imposed a particularly draconian sentence. The judge sentenced Diana to three years probation, 1300 hours community service, and “to take a journalism ethics course, undergo a psychiatric evaluation and get any necessary treatment at this [sic] own expense (which turned out the be $200), and stay a minimum of ten feet away from anyone under 18” (pg. 1). In addition to this, Diana was prohibited from drawing or creating “anything that could be deemed obscene, even in the privacy of his own home. To assure his order was followed, the judge gave officers the right to conduct a warrantless search of the Diana home at any time, and without prior notice” (pg. 1). Diana’s conviction stands as the Supreme Court denied the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s petition to hear the case “‘without comment,’ thereby ending all possibility of overturning Diana’s conviction” (CBLDF Case Files – Florida v. Mike Diana ).

The content of Diana’s underground comix represents the more extreme side of the alternative comics scene, with art and stories that blend sex with violence into a frenzied orgy of blood and other bodily fluids. Diana freely engages with taboo topics, be it incest or profiles on serial killers, without limits based on societal expectations of “good taste.” At times, both the narration accompanying the art and the prose stories resemble Robert Crumb’s work in their frank discussion of sexual fetishes and fantasies that go far beyond the heterosexual, procreative sex endorsed by more conservative elements in society. Diana simply took the niche Crumb and others carved out in the 1960s underground and pushed it to the extreme, combining sexuality with the similarly exaggerated horror elements found in most direct-to-VHS horror films of the 1990s. His artistic style, which forgoes realism for a more primitive form somewhere between Fauvism and neo-expressionism, further conveys the ugliness and base nature of the world. In my own study of the underground comix scene, Diana’s work is at the more outrageous end of the spectrum, but it shows a clear heritage with artists and writers of the 1960s and 1970s. Diana forces the reader to rethink the boundaries of taste. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Miller v. California allowed local communities to define their own obscenity standards, which doomed Diana in conservative Florida. Despite Diana making his art on his own and for a consenting adult audience, moral entrepreneurs who found it repugnant chose not to examine its place in art that challenges the consumer and instead censored him. Those interested in the underground comix scene or censorship law will find this volume worthy of study.… (mer)