35 Facts About Mike Diana

Michael Christopher Diana was born on 1969 and is an American underground cartoonist.

Mike Diana is the first person to receive a criminal conviction in the United States for artistic obscenity for his comic Boiled Angel.

Mike Diana's 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, Mike Diana was charged under Florida law with obscenity.

Meanwhile, Mike Diana had moved to New York, which declined to extradite him to Florida, and he completed his probation there.

Mike Diana's 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.

Mike 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.

In 1979, when nine-year-old Mike Diana was in the middle of fourth grade, he and his family moved from Geneva, New York to Largo, Florida.

Mike Diana began drawing comics in high school, influenced by macabre subject matter such as Topps Ugly stickers, Wacky Packages and Creature Feature cards.

Mike Diana 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".

Mike Diana enjoyed visiting the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg.

Mike Diana 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 conservative Florida atmosphere against which Mike Diana chafed influenced the graphic nature of his imagery.

Mike Diana distributed them to his friends and submitted them to horror magazines, but was met with rejection.

Mike 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.

In 1988 Mike Diana and his friend Robert, who was 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.

In 1988 nineteen-year-old Mike Diana was working as an elementary school janitor in Largo, where he would use the school's copy machine to print out the magazine.

Mike Diana was fired by the school after some of the material that he had left there was discovered.

Mike Diana contacted the non-profit First Amendment organization the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which provided him with a lawyer, Luke Lirot, and paid Mike Diana's legal fees, which would later total $10,000.

Lirot argued that Flores' letters constituted entrapment, but failed to get the case summarily dismissed, or to get the case moved to Tampa, where he and Mike Diana felt they would get a more sympathetic jury.

Mike Diana testified for over three hours to explain his art to the jury, though the judge denied his request to enter into evidence a stack of his old underground comics, with which Mike Diana wished to illustrate that he was not doing anything unprecedented.

Mike Diana further likened Largo to a "police state", saying that the police had the fire department evict his family from their house with only one week's notice, and bulldozed it.

Judge Walter Fullerton ordered Mike Diana held in jail for four days until sentencing without bail, which drew criticism from publications such as St Petersburg Times and Mother Jones magazine, with the latter's Sean Henry stating that while this was the norm for murderers and drug lords, it is not so for those convicted of misdemeanors.

Fullerton ordered Mike Diana to follow a state-supervised psychiatric evaluation at his own expense, to take an ethics-in-journalism class, and ruled that he was to submit to unannounced, warrantless searches of his personal papers by the police and deputized probation officers from the Salvation Army, which would allow them to seize any drawings or writings.

Mike Diana is definitely the first artist who's been banned as part of his sentence.

Mike Diana, who suspected her of inflating her bill because she knew the court had ordered him to pay for the exams, refused, and was never given the test results.

Mike Diana's attorney stated that Diana was unaware of the forgery and charges were dropped when Diana agreed to a pretrial probation program.

In 1996, while his case was still on appeal in Florida, Mike Diana moved to New York City, where he was granted permission to serve out his sentence, and fulfill his community service obligation through volunteer work for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

Mike Diana found another psychiatrist who charged him only $100 and concluded that he was perfectly normal, which she reported to the Florida court.

Mike Diana performed his community service by working about ten hours per week at a Lower East Side community garden and another six hours per week at God's Love We Deliver, a group that delivers food to HIV patients.

In February 2020,26 years after his sentence, Mike Diana was removed from probation.

Mike Diana was published and represented by Shane Bugbee and Michael Hunt Publishing.

Mike Diana indicated a desire one day to produce a graphic novel about the court case and how his life in Florida influenced the rebellious nature of his art.

Mike Diana has collaborated with Carlo Quispe on Uranus Comix.

Mike Diana has indicated that he usually does not vote, the one exception being the 1992 US presidential election, in which he voted for Ross Perot in the hopes of preventing a victory by Bill Clinton.