Creative expression or compulsive exploitation in underground comix: the scapegoating of Mike Diana’s Boiled Angel

Abstract

This paper follows the case study of Mike Diana – a 24-year-old Floridian artist, writer and zine creator – who in the early 1990s self-published eight issues of his comix zine Boiled Angel to a circulation of 300 people around the world. Local authorities confiscated his work and, through an elaborate legal trial, Diana became the first comic-book artist to be arrested, tried and jailed for creating offensive material. This paper uses the scapegoating process, borrowing from the work of literary critic Kenneth Burke. The discourse produced by the prosecutor’s rhetoric shifted from the creative expression of art to vilifying Diana as the ‘essence of evil’, whereby the only way the community could merge together to expunge their guilt was to purify themselves by punishing Diana to the fullest extent by making sure he received his ‘just desserts’.