From worried parents to policemen with built-in ‘Satan detectors’, underground comics have never lacked enemies. And for 30 years Neil Gaiman and his friends have fought back in the name of free speech

In 1994, Mike Diana found himself in jail near his home in Largo, Florida. Sitting alongside rapists, muggers and murderers, he spent four days waiting to be sentenced after his conviction at Pinellas County court. His crime? Making comics.

Diana was just 25 when he became the first person in the US to be convicted of “artistic obscenity”. The jury took 40 minutes to find him guilty on three counts: for publishing, distributing and advertising his comic series Boiled Angel.

Now based in New York, Diana remembers his time in jail clearly. “It was an empty cell with a metal bed, a bright light that stayed on all the time,” he says. “I got a baloney sandwich to eat and a cup of Kool-Aid … I had no idea what they were going to do to me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The cover of Mike Diana’s Boiled Angel comic #1. Photograph: © Mike Diana

As a schoolboy in Florida, Diana had excelled in art. He had been fascinated by the nearby Salvador Dalí museum, and in his teenage years had been drawn to underground comics and horror magazines like Eerie and Creepy. While still a teen, he began to publish his own underground comics, chief among them Boiled Angel, a series of anthologies that he personally mailed out to subscribers.

In common with many underground comics, Diana’s subject matter was uncompromising and sometimes difficult to read: “Babies being mutilated, priests molesting children,” as he puts it. There was child rape, necrophilia, extreme depictions of sadism and violence. Diana even visited prisons to interview serial killers for research.

In 1991, the FBI turned up at his mother’s house after he was identified as a suspect in a series of rapes and murders in the state. A local police officer had sent them a copy of Boiled Angel after similar materials were found in the possession of Danny Rolling, the man who was eventually convicted of the murders. After giving a blood sample Diana was ruled out as a suspect, but the FBI passed on its dossier to local police. As Diana was producing the next issues, he began receiving letters from somebody called Mike Flores, who said he was an artist and interested in Diana’s work.

“He sent me 10 letters,” says Diana. “He kept making the point that he wasn’t a police officer, which at the time I thought a bit weird.” Diana duly sent him some comics and heard nothing further – until, in 1993, he received a letter from the state attorney’s office, charging him with obscenity. “Largo is a very conservative place,” he says, “I think they thought what I was doing was making a mockery of their community.”

Diana was broke, young, scared. Then the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) stepped in, hiring him a lawyer, Luke Lirot. “I know it cost $50,000 (£37,000) to prosecute me, and probably tens of thousands for the defence, which obviously I couldn’t have afforded,” Diana says.

At the obscenity trial, the jurors were asked what they considered art. 'Needlepoint,' one said.

Lirot first argued that Diana had been entrapped; that defence failed and Diana went to trial in 1994, watching as the jury wrangled over whether Boiled Angel constituted art. “I wanted to show them some underground comics so they could see there was a precedent for what I was doing, but they wouldn’t look at them,” says Diana. “If they could prove that what I was doing had no artistic or literary value, they could prosecute me.” The jurors were asked what they considered art. “Needlepoint,” one said.

The jury found Diana guilty. He received a $3,000 fine, was ordered to stay away from minors and given three years’ probation – one of the conditions of which was that he was not allowed to draw. He did anyway: “I was told the police could make unannounced visits at any time, without a warrant, to see if I was drawing cartoons. I used to hide paintings in the trunk of my car and get them out at 2am to work on, when I was hoping the police might have better things to do.”

But although the CBLDF lost the case, in Mike Diana they had found something new: a poster boy for the fight against censorship.

Robert Crumb is among several authors who have financially supported the fund. Photograph: © Robert Crumb

Set up in 1986, the CBLDF exists to fight censorship of comic books, protect the First Amendment right to free speech and, more pragmatically, to provide legal representation for comics creators facing prosecution.

Founder Denis Kitchen was running Kitchen Sink Press, a publisher of underground comics, when he heard about a police raid on Friendly Frank’s comic shop in Chicago. Six officers had seized seven titles, including erotic comic Omaha the Cat Dancer, Robert Crumb’s anthology Weirdo and SF-smut comic Heavy Metal, and arrested manager Michael Correa. Friendly Frank’s was shut down for five days, but not before one of the arresting officers told newspapers there was a “satanic influence” in the comics seized.

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Kitchen was appalled. “I realised immediately that if police officers with built-in Satan detectors could get away with making arrests and seizing objectionable comic books, much more than the comics industry was at stake,” he says. He swiftly raised $20,000 for a fighting fund, helped by comics heavyweights like Crumb and Frank Miller. “It was gratifying to see that sudden unity among the comics community,” Kitchen says. “I was more used to people squabbling.”

By now Correa had been found guilty of intent to disseminate obscene material, but Correa hired a respected First Amendment attorney, Burton Joseph, to appeal the conviction. It was subsequently overturned.

The CBLDF was born, and had won its first battle.

Today, the fund employs two full-time officers, who spend most of their time on cases where parents have complained about graphic novels in school libraries. In 2015 alone, 275 books were banned in libraries across the US (and that’s only what was reported).

It relies on donations to meet its $800,000 annual legal bills. A good portion of that comes from British author Neil Gaiman, via the Gaiman Foundation. Having moved to the US in 1992, Gaiman watched Mike Diana’s case unfold on home turf. “I immediately thought, there’s a wrongness to this,” he says. “That’s what prompted me to do a 12-year stint on the CBLDF board. This is America. People are meant to be on the side of liberty and free expression.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An image from Death Talks about Life, a 1994 Aids awareness comic book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Photograph: blog.queercomics.info

Gaiman’s own work has come under scrutiny in the US; the Jacksonville chief of police told the owner of a local comic shop that if he stocked Death: The High Cost of Living, he’d be shut down in a week. “What did she object to? A safe-sex sequence in which Death puts a condom on a banana. Without the CBLDF, those comics would have been removed,” Gaiman says. “Over a banana.”

When people say 'I don't see how you can approve of that', I think of Mike Diana, in the cells for making comics Neil Gaiman

It was Gaiman’s wish that the CBLDF beef up its education programme. “At the point where my 12-year run was coming to an end, I donated money to set up a fund to provide information and advice to anyone feeling threatened by censorship, to any shop told it can’t sell comics, to the librarians whose jobs are on the line because someone doesn’t like to see an Alan Moore graphic novel contaminating the shelves.”

When it comes to defending some titles, there are grey areas. Some genres veer into uncomfortable territory, like Japanese manga, which frequently sexualises children. In 2014, Middlesbrough man Robul Hoque was convicted in the UK for having explicit manga-style drawings of girls in school uniform on his laptop, a case CBLDF was not involved with. Should this be defended?

The CBLDF has a Voltairesque approach to its work: the defence of free speech overshadows any personal qualms about the material being attacked. The fund distinguishes between expression and conduct, says Charles Brownstein, its executive director for the past 14 years. It defends “all manner of expression” and does not defend conduct “where someone hurts or abuses a real person”.

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“When it comes to comic books … you might not want to look at it, but that doesn’t mean it should be prosecuted,” he says. “As Neil Gaiman says, we have to defend the icky speech as well as the mainstream speech.”

“When people say, I don’t see how you can approve of that or defend this, or that something shouldn’t be supported,” Gaiman adds, “I think of Mike Diana, in the cells for making comics. I think of Mike Diana, given the choice between not drawing, which was all he loved, or doing it surreptitiously, afraid of a police raid. I think of Mike Diana, who was only young himself, told he couldn’t do any job working with children. So, yes, you can always defend someone who is essentially just making marks on paper. It’s not like they’re killing people, is it?”