Adult Killer

Mike Diana‘s style is one of the most unforgettable in contemporary painting and drawing; the bright bold colours of western advertising are combined with rough black lines drawn with the audacity of a Japanese master to form the twisted characters that populate his world. Diana became known in the early nineties for his terrifying child-like drawings published in his Boiled Angel papers. Originally made privately on a copy machine and released in only sixty copies, these comics are now hunted by collectors ready to pay thousands of dollars for only a few pages. These drawings have grown over two decades into an amazing body of work; the main theme of which is a cautionary one, a warning that the adult world is a sick and twisted place. Mike Diana never wanted to be a serious member of the rational adult world, because in his opinion the neo-liberal community of elders he chooses to reject is guilty of the same perversions that the conservative media routinely employ to identify as ‘moral failure’. Mike Diana’s work portrays the adult as a hypocritical sanguinary monster, and the kid as his honest cruel opposer.