Obscenities
The terms of the probation require the artist to stay away from children and to stop drawing his characteristic work.
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Some of the above items are obscene; some, perhaps, aren’t–it all depends on who’s doing the defining. Earlier this year on the gulf coast of Florida, the definers were the Pinellas County state’s attorney’s office. To them Mike Diana’s drawings were obscene, and a judge and jury agreed. Diana, who puts out a xerox-‘n’-staples publication called Boiled Angel, was convicted of three counts of distributing and advertising obscene material. His sentence included the terms enumerated above, plus requirements to undergo psychiatric evaluation, stay employed, and work 12,000 hours of community service. It’s the proscription against drawing or possessing allegedly obscene material–and the unrestricted access police and his probation officer have to his house to make sure he doesn’t–that give the sentence its Soviet-style frisson. But the others have punch as well: Diana says the psychiatrist who examined him charged him $1,200 for the session, and when Diana said he couldn’t afford it the psychiatrist withheld the evaluation, leaving him in violation of his parole. Only a stay in the probation pending appeal, granted this week, saved him from more trouble.
Over the phone Diana seems pleasant enough, and shy to the point of diffidence. He got into his uncrowded field after discovering underground comic books as a teenager. Why does he draw the stuff he does? “I like the shock value,” he says after a moment. “Some people like roller coaster rides and some people don’t. It’s exciting. Not in a sexual way, just in the power of the story and the images. It’s stuff you don’t usually see.
