Mike Diana - Amateur Publishing Career

Amateur Publishing Career

Diana began drawing comics in high school, influenced by macabre subject matter such as Topps Ugly stickers, Wacky Packages and Creature Feature cards. Publications that he drew inspiration from included Heavy Metal, Creepy, Eerie, Basil Wolverton's Plop!, Bernie Wrightson's run on Swamp Thing, and the work of Jack Davis. He also enjoyed underground comics from creators such as S. Clay Wilson, Greg Irons, Rory Hayes, and Jack Chick's Chick tracts, which he describes as "sick". He also enjoyed visiting the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg.

Though Diana enjoyed the stained glass windows in the church he attended every Sunday as a child, seeing Jesus hanging on the cross disturbed him. He 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 animus he developed toward the Roman Catholic Church, along with the Jack Chick tracts, influenced Diana's depiction of anti-religious themes in his work. The conservative Florida atmosphere against which Diana chafed also influenced the graphic nature of his imagery.

In 1987, during his senior year of high school his aversion to class inspired him to draw his own comics, which would depict unpopular teachers being graphically killed, and which he would distribute to his friends. He submitted them to horror magazines, but was met with rejection. 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. The content of his work was often characterized by nudity, violence, caricature of the human form and scatological themes, which he says he produces in order to "open people's eyes" by shocking them. In 1988 Diana and his friend Robert, who was also 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. Later that year Diana created another zine called Angelfuck, which was named after a song from the Misfits album Static Age, of which he published three issues. He then decided to do a digest size magazine, which he called Boiled Angel, which also depicted such horrors as cannibalism, torture, rape and murder. The first issue had a print run of 65 signed and numbered copies, and by the time he printed issue #2, demand by readers, who were mostly people in other states and those who had read write-ups in review publications like Fact Sheet Five, increased its print run to 300.

In 1988 nineteen-year-old Diana was working as an elementary school janitor in Largo, where he would use the school's copy machine to print out the magazine. The publication, which depicted subjects such as child rape and sodomy, bestiality, human mutilation and drug use, was distributed to about 300 subscribers. Diana was fired by the school after some of the material that he had left there was discovered.