Mike Diana

[badMike]

From this week's column:

If the Mike Diana case is any indicator, the courts and legislature don't distinguish between the two at all. (Diana, in the late '80s, was a comics artist, and not an especially good one, who was forbidden by a judge to even draw any of his creepy fantasies after he received a sex crimes conviction – I forget, was it pedophilia? – and higher courts upheld the restriction. A Florida case, natch.)

No, it wasn't pedophilia. Mike was named a suspect in a murder case only after cops saw an issue of his self-published comic, Boiled Angel. He didn't have anything to do with the actual case, he was just a suspect because the cops didn't like his gory comics.

The cops then sent the comics to the State Attorney who charged him with three counts of obscenity. He was found guilty on all three counts and ordered not to draw while on probation, to not hang around with children, undergo psychological testing and a bunch of other insane crap.

(I already knew most of that, but refreshed my fading memory with Wikipedia (of course) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Diana)

Mike's official website is here: http://www.testicle.com/mikediana.htm

I think that URL will get you thrown in jail if you visit it from the state of Florida. So be careful.

P.S. His artwork is quite good if you enjoy that "primitive art" kind of thing. I like it.

[FunkyGreenJerusalem]

I was under the impression, from a Wizard article I read about it years ago (WIZARD!), that the comic actually was similar to the murder, because his mother worked at the police station, and he'd seen the file/photos there or some such.

[badMike]

I was under the impression, from a Wizard article I read about it years ago (WIZARD!), that the comic actually was similar to the murder, because his mother worked at the police station, and he'd seen the file/photos there or some such.

When it comes to hard-hitting journalism, I don't think I'd trust Wizard. Here's what actually happened. First, a direct quote from Mike Diana:

"I found out that it was someone in California (who brought me to the attention of the authorities) in 1991. He had Boiled Angel #6. On the cover, I'd drawn a naked man with an erection cutting open a girl and pulling out the fetus. This was right after the Gainesville murders, when five university coeds were killed. Something about that issue made the person in California think I might be the murderer, so he forwarded a copy to the police in Florida."

http://www.impactpress.com/articles/...censr6799.html

The "Gainesville murders" that Diana refers to were committed by Danny Rolling, who has since been executed for the crimes. Wikipedia (also not a perfectly trusted source) describes the killings:

His signature was to arrange the bodies in such a way as to highlight the carnage in the rooms — this even included setting up several mirrors and decapitating and/or posing his victims.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Rolling