I met America’s first sentenced-because-of-some-drawings man in Superchief gallery. The very talented and prolific Mike Diana explained me his story, in the middle of his drawings.
[French adaptation here.]
His website
Who are you?
Mike Diana. Living here in New York. It’s good to be here. I was born in New York, upscale New York, in a small town called Geneva and I escaped. Well, I was forced to move to Florida when I was a kid with my family and never felt like I adjusted well to Florida lifestyle and felt like it was very conservative and stiff.
You said that it was probably because of Florida that you have this rebellious side.
Yeah, I was forced to go to church even when I lived on New York but in Florida it seemed much more extreme. And I later on kind of was going against religion in some of my drawings. I had a big influence with TV news for my comics and drawings. And I would see reports about children being molested and murders and all kind of crazy things — even priests molesting children. So, I started drawing these anti-religious drawings.
What does New York City mean for you?
Well, New York has been much better because I escaped here. Escaped from Florida to New York in 1996 and… Just much better, much better in New York. It’s not as conservative and… I came here and met other friends who were doing artwork and comics and fanzines. Even bookstores that sell that kind of items. See, that’s just a lot better.
Isn’t anything sacred for you?
Well maybe not in the world of comics. I do like Mother Nature and animals and everything. So, I don’t usually have or wanna show animals being killed. Sometimes but mostly people.
I just feel like the world is being destroyed by the humans and all that and the technology in some ways, so I’d like to do other comics someday, more about that kind of stuff, you know, Revenge of Mother Nature, something like that. Would be fun.
How did it all begin?
Well, I started becoming a fan of comic books, horror comics from the 1950s. You know, they had gross kind of themes, murder and strange monsters. So I started to draw these kind of things that I would see and eventually, I started getting into the underground comics, which was more extreme. They’re from the 1970s. That’s S. Clay Wilson and Greg Irons and Robert Crumb, those underground artists that were doing a kind of wild comics that I liked.
You know, I like the Jon Waters movies, the early ones with Divine, weird horror movies that I would watch on TV or rented videos.
So eventually, I kept trying to draw more gross items to top myself. I made my fanzine, Boiled Angel, I sent it to this magazine called Flat Sheet Five, they reviewed zines and so I finally got people ordering it from the mail. Well that went up to three hundred copies.
After that, I was doing the fanzines and then the police… Someone sent a copy of number six to the police in Florida. There were these murders that had happened and… yeah… so, the detectives showed up and they said that I was wanted for the murders. I was a suspect. And I got to give a blood sample for DNA testing to clear my name.
And that was the same detective that kept tabs on me and had ordered for Boiled Angel number seven and number eight through the mail. Yeah, so, I hadn’t realized any of that was going on. Later on, my lawyer was able to get my case records about all the stuff that was happening with the police behind the scenes. They’d ordered the seven and eight of Boiled Angel to put it in the file that stayed in this attorney office and no one wanted to prosecute the case until two years later, prosecutor Stuart Baggish had come across them on file maybe just by accident.
So, I had to go to court for that. That was three counts of obscenity: publishing and distributing and advertising obscenity.
What does it mean, “obscenity”, in the USA? I don’t think it’s the same in Belgium.
In Florida, the obscenity law is set up just to get around the Constitution.
The First Amendment?
Yeah. They say if something lacks artistic value or scientific or literary or political value, then it’s obscene. If it has any one of those values, it cannot be considered obscene because it’s protected by Freedom of Speech.
So, they went through the artwork and they proved in court that was not artwork, which was strange for me to understand: how drawings cannot be art? But by obscenity, they mean pornography, I mean, it’s very broad, the law [showing the exhibition] That would be considered obscene, any of it.
The law also says that it has to be obscene taken as a whole — not just a page but every page is obscene — to be considered obscene. That’s actually what they did, they said every page is obscene.
So, yeah, it’s hard to understand, sometimes, when I think about it.
Are you still planning to do a graphic novel about your trial?
Oh, yes, I wanna do that. That’d be good. Expose all of the Florida for what it is.
There’s lot of little details about the whole story.
One of them is when I was on the news, on TV, my neighbors and people recognized me. And these aren’t the kind of people that you want to know about you, watching you, you know. People who lived across, they were a very religious family with a new born baby and so, they were afraid for their lives, and afraid for their baby’s life.
And at the time, my brother — two years younger but we look similar, we almost look like the same person and I think that they thought me and my brother were the same person — my brother would have wild parties, he would have fires upfront the house, and him and his friends were listening to death metal so they’d been spraying crosses upside down. And they thought that was me, you know “who is this crazy person?”
So, they called the police so many times just for different things that the police had the Fire Department coming out and they declared that our house didn’t have a proper foundation. They condemned it, gave us a week to move out. Basically, they kicked us out of the neighborhood, you know, so we had to move.
Yeah, that’s one the stories, you know, little things like that.
And then during my sentencing, the public could come in the courtroom. Well, I was brought from the jail to be sentenced by the judge and I saw that guy that looked across from us. The father, the husband of the religious family was there to tell the judge what a horrible person I was, you know, that he feared for his life and that I needed to be locked up, you know.
But luckily, they didn’t lock me up, I just got probation.
What do you think of Rolling’s [the actual Gainsville murderer] drawings?
I liked his drawings when I saw them. There was one that I saw that had eight skulls in it. He’d put eight skulls because he’d kill eight people. Yeah, that was nice drawings, you know.
It’s interesting that they can have, people drawing, you know, they can have a new life in jail. He used to kill, he ain’t killing people anymore. So, he starts drawing skulls and things. It’s interesting.
I think all that story is about the symbolic part of art.
Yeah, I feel like it is symbolic, I guess.
Well, all work of art are looking down at the past.
I used to go to the Salvator Dalí Museum in Florida and that was very kind of like nightmare kind of paintings, dreamlike and I would think about what it means, you know, sometimes, I have dreams that are very much like his paintings and I think that helped me getting more into paintings myself.
I was always surprised in Florida that — I guess ‘cause Dalí is considered such an artist, you know — that’s not considered obscene.
Yeah, I like doing symbols in my paintings sometimes. Kind of just simple, simple items, you know. Yeah.
Was the ethics on journalism course you had been sentenced to take interesting ?
Yeah, it was interesting. I took it here in New York City ‘cause I had to have probation transfer. And I went to the class and the teacher, he had worked in the newspapers and he had heard about my case. So, actually, he started talking about my case and he introduced me to the class and everything. So I kinda became part of the lessons. That was interesting.
Most of the class was about journalism ethics, which is how journalists know what to say and not to say, and issues that have to do with privacy, and those kind of things.
Pretty basic, you know, but that was good.
What does art mean for you?
I was doing art works since I was a child. My parents put me in an after school art program, creating sculptures and drawings and crafts. So, I think art has a lot of different possibilities, things that can be…
What I don’t think of as art is in Florida, what they consider art: mainstream. People like those paintings of the sunset, nice beach scenes, still life, kind of nature paintings, you know, but it brings to such a point where it’s very…hmm… almost like no feeling.
You know the guy with curly hair that teaches you on TV how to do paintings step by step? They’ve never even tried to paint that way and they can’t figure it out. It’s too difficult.
Did punk rock influence you? As Angelfuck comes from the Misfits.
Yeah, that was the Misfits song, back when I used to listen to them. I had three issues of Angelfuck and then I changed it to Boiled Angel.
I’ve always liked the punk music and the weird music, you know, GG Allin, I used to like him. I saw his show and that was definitively the craziest show. That was in Orlando, Florida and then the police came in halfway through and arrested G.G. Allin, arrested the band for being nude. Basically for obscenity. That was the one time I saw him.
Back around 1987 and 88, I used to see a lot of punk bands. There are a lot of good bands out there, you know. I used to see some death metal bands also in Florida ‘cause there was so much of that stuff there. Marylin Manson is from Florida, so I met him.
And yeah, it was definitively the time when I used to see many bands, around the eighties and nineties.
Do you have an artistic guilty pleasure?
Well, probably horror movies but that’s like a normal thing, you know. Yeah, I mean I guess it all comes out in my artwork, you know, all the strange stuff, just drawing weird weird things, trying to think of something stranger to draw, maybe [he laughs].
What turns you on in art?
I guess, like things I haven’t seen before. Something that really makes me think: “Waw! that’s unordinary!” or “That’s —you know — something different”, maybe.
What turns you off in art?
I think that most art would probably turn me off because that’s very normal. In New York, I would see the galleries sometimes and there would just be artwork that I don’t like. It doesn’t seem special, seems like the same old thing again and again.
Just like the sculptures themselves, they are boring, you wonder why it’s considered art. But it’s on the moneymaking side. Yeah, so it’s interesting, the whole art world.
And sometimes, I do see good artwork that I like in museums. They had a comic art show with old comics and stuff, that was about a month ago. They have a cartoon museum. So, I do like to see the whole comic art. You know, it’s from a time when they didn’t really consider comics being art. And now, it’s being saved and preserved as artwork and that’s a good thing. I like to see it.
Would you tell us a joke?
I have a good one but it works better on video, that’s the problem.
We can do it on video!
Pics: Charly Delcommune