Mike Diana

Michael Christopher Diana (born 1969) is an American underground cartoonist. His work is largely self-published and deals with themes including sexuality, violence, and religion. He is the first person to receive a criminal conviction in the United States for artistic obscenity for his comic Boiled Angel.

During his childhood and teen years, Diana took an interest in creating art others found disturbing. Living in Florida as an adult, he began publishing his comics in zines, which he primarily distributed through the mail. His work came to the attention of the FBI during their investigation of serial killings in another Florida city, and they forwarded it to Diana's local police after ruling him out as a suspect. In 1992, after he sent copies of his work to an undercover police officer, Diana was charged under Florida law with obscenity. The jury found him guilty, and his sentence included supervised probation, during which any art or writings he produced were subject to unannounced, warrantless searches and seizure by the police. Two of the three counts of obscenity were upheld on appeal, and an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied. Meanwhile, Diana moved to New York, which declined to extradite him to Florida, and he completed his probation there.

Mike Diana was born in 1969 in New York City. He, his younger sister, and younger brother Matt were baptized Catholic. His mother placed him in an after school art program where, for one assignment, his class was to collect seashells on the beach and incorporate them into a collage made with plaster of Paris. Diana instead incorporated the garbage and a dead fish he had found, referring to the beach pollution that was the topic of contemporary news stories. Diana later related this story during his obscenity trial to illustrate his point of view that "art can be ugly and convey a message."

In 1979, when nine-year-old Diana was in the middle of fourth grade, he and his family moved from Geneva, New York to Largo, Florida. Though Diana received barely passing or failing grades, he received As in art classes.

Diana began drawing comics in high school, influenced by macabre subject matter such as Topps Ugly stickers, Wacky Packages and Creature Feature cards. Publications that he drew inspiration from included Heavy Metal, Creepy, Eerie, Basil Wolverton's Plop!, Bernie Wrightson's run on Swamp Thing, and the work of Jack Davis. He also enjoyed underground comics from creators such as S. Clay Wilson, Greg Irons, Rory Hayes, and Jack Chick's religious tracts, which he describes as "sick". He also enjoyed visiting the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg.

Though Diana enjoyed the stained glass windows in the church he attended every Sunday as a child, seeing Jesus hanging on the cross disturbed him. He eventually came to so loathe the donating of money into collection baskets following sermons that spoke of burning in Hell, his Sunday bible study class, and the denouncing of popular music among his fellow congregants that he stopped going to church by age 16. The animus he developed toward the Roman Catholic Church, along with the Jack Chick tracts, influenced Diana's depiction of anti-religious themes in his work. The conservative Florida atmosphere against which Diana chafed also influenced the graphic nature of his imagery.

In 1987, during his senior year of high school his aversion to class inspired him to draw his own comics depicting unpopular teachers being graphically killed. He distributed them to his friends and submitted them to horror magazines, but was met with rejection. Diana, who lived with his father, would stay up late at night and into the morning working on his comics following working shifts at his father's convenience store in Largo. The content of his work was often characterized by nudity, violence, caricature of the human form and scatological themes, which he says he produces in order to "open people's eyes" by shocking them.

In 1988 Diana and his friend Robert, who was also born in New York State, bonded over their mutual dislike of the Florida climate, and after Robert got a job at a print shop, he convinced his boss to let them print at cost 960 copies of a zine on which they collaborated called HVUYIM, provided that they did the labor. Later that year Diana created another zine called Angelfuck, which was named after a song from the Misfits album Static Age, of which he published three issues. He then decided to do a digest size magazine, which he called Boiled Angel, which also depicted such horrors as cannibalism, torture, rape, and murder. The first issue had a print run of 65 signed and numbered copies, and by the time he printed issue #2, demand by readers, who were mostly people in other states and those who had read write-ups in review publications like Factsheet Five, increased its print run to 300.