by Marc Savlov
It’s that desolate strip of Interstate 35 that cuts a swath through the otherwise tedious, unremarkable landscape of
Bell County, just north of the Highway 190 jig that takes travelers west to
Killeen, Fort Hood, and then Lampasas if they’re so inclined.
An overcast Sunday morning, the sky muddy and bruised like the skin around a
two-day-old welt. Nasty going on the highway, the cars hauling semi-cautiously
southbound, studiously avoiding the back-spatter from passing 18-wheelers,
wipers going furiously. A maroon ’81 Chevy Impala switches lanes to pass an
annoying out-of-stater that’s just cut them off. No turn signal for either
party.
Two miles down the road, the Impala occupants — a woman and two young men —
catch sight of a Texas State Hi-Po creeping up behind them. The red-and-blues
suddenly flash on, signalling them over to the shoulder, where a trooper and
his partner calmly check the driver and the three passengers’ IDs and then
search the automobile. Not much there: scattered luggage and bundles of trade
paperback books and promos make up most of the load. Nevertheless, one of the
young men is handcuffed and led off to jail after the officers find what may or
may not be a minor amount of a controlled substance on his person.
That would be Mike Diana, and this is his introduction to Texas.
In the world of pop art and underground comics, Diana’s name is swiftly
becoming legend, not so much due to his abilities, though those are far from
suspect, but because of his seemingly insurmountable strain of bad luck,
involving both his life’s work and the laws of his home state (and, apparently,
others as well).
Seeing him on the street, you’d never think he was a cause celebre to
thousands of like-minded artists (including Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus
auteur Art Spiegelman), an object of favorable press in everything from
The New York Times and The Village Voice to Al Goldstein’s
Screw Magazine, a bastion of Court TV reportage, and the ACLU’s current
(semi-)fave rave.
In person, Diana’s physicality is challenging: he resembles nothing so much as
Marvel Comics’ Thor minus the hammer and perhaps a tad smaller in stature. His
long, blonde locks, darting ice-blue eyes and buff physique belie his uniformly
artistic nature. From the looks of things, he’d be better off fronting a
low-rent metal band.
His demeanor, though, gives him away. He speaks hesitantly, in a tiny wisp of
a voice you have to strain — really strain — to pick up. He’s more
like a little kid constantly gauging how far away the safety net is than a
revered and reviled underground cartoonist. More than anything, he acts like a
dodgeball victim waiting to happen. A lot of this may have to do with his
situation, which is this….
A transplanted native of the smallish, rural
Florida township of Largo, Diana had for several years been publishing a
Xeroxed collection of his comics and artwork under the title Boiled
Angel. Chiefly distributed through the mail to a handful of fans and
subscribers — the print run rarely exceeded 300 copies per issue, minuscule
even by zine standards — Boiled Angel was Diana’s way of lashing out at
the horrors he saw around him every day. Child abuse, murder, deviance and a
bloodthirsty bacchanalia of religious debauchery were the general topics in any
given issue.
Growing up in Pinellas County, in a town and county surrounded by “churches on
one corner, adult bookstores on the other,” Diana used his artwork to confront
the hypocrisy he saw as inherent in society.
“There really is a church on every corner, you know?” he says. “A lot of my
work is a reaction against that. I was forced to go to church when I was young,
which I didn’t like at all. Roman Catholic, but none of my family goes anymore.
They just all stopped.
“[In Pinellas County] they have problems just keeping certain books on the
shelves in the schools down there. Alice in Wonderland was banned a
while back, I remember. They’ll go after anyone they think is doing something
`obscene.’ [Shock-rock scatologist] G.G. Allin used to always get arrested
there.”
While the majority of comics readers found his work decidedly repellent, a few
saw it as groundbreaking and astute, simultaneously wildly disturbing, ironic
and hilarious.
My own introduction to Boiled Angel came through Seth R. Friendman’s
zine journal Factsheet Five, where Diana’s work — and I’m paraphrasing
here — was reviewed as “not for the squeamish” or somesuch thing. When I
finally got my hand on a real live copy, I had to agree. Diana’s images of
huge, bloated penises and rampant anti-Christ mythology were at the very least
shocking, and his hideously over-the-top visions of incestuous families and
childhood rape and dismemberment were off-putting even for someone as
ravenously morbid as myself. Clearly, this guy was operating on a different
level.
In 1990, after the release of Boiled Angel No. 6, Diana was called in
for questioning at the height of the Gainesville, Florida student murders when
a member of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement came into contact with
the magazine. Then, several years or so down the line, after the publication of
issues No. 7 and Ate, in March of 1993, Diana was called to
appear in court on obscenity charges.
“It really surprised me,” he says. “When I got the notice in the mail to
appear in court, I couldn’t believe at first that it was happening. I never
expected them to go that far. I mean, it’s surprising that they even paid any
attention to something with such a limited print run. They made it seem like I
was giving them out all over Florida, or something, when actually the only
copies I sold in Pinellas County were the ones the undercover police officer
bought from me through the mail.”
As it turned out, Assistant State Attorney Stuart Baggish was out to make his
case, and, as Diana and others have speculated, his career [Baggish has since
retired his state position and moved on to private practice], in one fell
swoop, complete with a local police officer corresponding with the artist under
the guise of a zine fanboy to obtain copies of Diana’s “prurient” work.
Says Diana, “He really, genuinely felt my work was sick. I think he felt like
he was cleaning up Florida or something.”
A full-blown, media-frenzied trial ensued, and despite much protest from the
zine and comics community (indeed, Denis Kitchen’s Comic Book Legal Defense
Fund has picked up most of the court costs thus far), the Orwellian outcome was
the artist’s conviction on “three counts of obscenity charges for: publishing,
distributing, and advertising Boiled Angel — #7 & Ate.
March 28 saw Diana’s sentencing by local Judge Walter Fullerton, who made no
bones about his personal distaste toward the artist. The outcome, expected by
perhaps no one except the six jury members (who themselves took only a brief 90
minutes to cast their lot with the state, and, admittedly had no idea what a
“zine” might be in the first place) was this: Diana was to pay $1,000 on each
count (minimum $100 per month), undergo psychological evaluation within 30 days
(at his own cost of $1,200), maintain full-time employment, give eight hours of
community service per week for three years, stay a minimum of 10 feet from
anyone under 18 years of age, take a course in journalism ethics (again at his
cost), be subject to unannounced searches of his premises by the police at any
time, and, worst of all, he was no longer allowed to “draw or create anything
that may be considered obscene or be in possession of any obscene material”
even if was patently for his own use.
Despite sound councel from First Amendment attorney Luke Lirot, Diana’s case
had ended disastrously, with serious ramifications not only for the artist, but
for artists in general. Suddenly the question on everyone’s mind was “if this
could happen in Pinellas County, why not here?”
Why not indeed?
This past June, Diana lost his first appeal. While he may be out on bond, the
sentence still looms. Currently, he is living in New York City with none other
than Kembra Smith and underground horror-rock band the Voluptuous Horror of
Karen Black (a more fitting sanctuary even Quasimodo couldn’t find).
The recent pub-
ication of The Worst of Boiled Angel by Chicago-based Mike Hunt
Publications (overseen by Shane Bugbee and Amy Stocky) has brought renewed
attention to his case, as has the subsequent book-signing tour, which brought
the three of them to Austin last month. Still, Diana’s potent stream of bad
luck seems to continue unabated (although his incarceration at the Bell County
Jail ended within hours, thanks to Bugbee’s ability to post a quick bond).
“I spent three months on probation and paid the fines,” says Diana. “I did my
community service work for the Vietnam Veterans’ Thrift Store in Largo. My
attorney convinced Judge Fullerton to hold my probation until the outcome of my
[next] appeal. I have no idea when that appeal will take place or what will
happen. Will a higher court come to the same decision? Will my material be
found obscene? I don’t know.”
And the rainy-day Hi-Po that pulled him over, along with Shane and driver
Amy?
“They saw the book in the car. They were talking about how `this stuff must
have been done by a real sick-o,’ and I was standing right there the whole
time…. Just lucky, I guess.” n
This article appears in October 11 • 1996 and October 11 • 1996 (Cover).