Ivan Mečl Boeken

Mike Diana (born 1969) became known in the early 1990s for scary, childlike drawings that he published in his Boiled Angel magazine. Over the past two decades, this body of work has grown to epic proportions, as Diana refines and expands his vision of a culture overloaded on greed and violence. This handsome box set consists of two volumes, Live and Die--the first of which compiles several comic-book sequences, while the second gathers paintings and drawings. "Art should afflict the comfortable and disturb the complacent, and Mike Diana's work does that in spades," says Neil Gaiman. "He's been arrested for his art, he's been sentenced for his art, and a local police force was even charged to make 24-hour random raids and spot-checks on Mike's living space, to make sure he wasn't committing art in secret. Now you can find out what all the fuss was about."

Stu Mead's (born 1955) paintings approach the art world at a tangent; though the artist received a formal art education, his cartoon-inspired style and predilection for painting prepubescent, female objects of desire has placed him somewhere outside the mainstream, but with a firm cult following. This monograph compiles many of Mead's paintings--fantastical, surreal and erotic--in a handsome hardcover. Inspired by the paintings and drawings of Hans Bellmer and Balthus, Mead works at the intersection of high and low art, unabashedly depicting taboo topics and scenarios. A student of Andrea Dworkin's in the 1980s, Mead comes out of the radical feminist movement, and his graphic painting style investigates identity, gender and social emancipation. Straddling the line between fairytale illustration and comic-book humor, Berlin-based Mead's controversial work is published as a retrospective for the first time.