Binky Brown Sampler

AUTHOR: Green, Justin

ARTIST: Justin Green (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Last Gasp

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1968-1995

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1995

Publication History

Inspired by the burgeoning underground comics scene and artist Robert Crumb, Justin Green began to create comics while still in art school. His first strip, “Confessions of a Mad School Boy,” was published by a periodical in Providence, Rhode Island, thanks to the mentorship of the Mad Peck, another underground cartoonist. The titular religion-plagued character was later named Binky Brown, based on a childhood nickname given to Green by an uncle, in “Binky Brown Makes up His Own Puberty Rites,” in Yellow Dog, issue 17, published by the Print Mint in 1969. In 1970, Green created “The Agony of Binky Brown,” published in 1971 in Laugh in the Dark, issue 1, from Last Gasp Eco Funnies.

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, a single-issue, mostly autobiographical story produced completely by Green, was published by Last Gasp in 1972 to continuing acclaim. By 1998, Last Gasp had sold fifty thousand copies of the comic. The only difference between the first and second editions is that a drawing of the Virgin Mary overlays a piece of text in the first edition but not in the second.

In addition to reproducing Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, the Binky Brown Sampler contains some material from Green’s other major Binky Brown work, Sacred and Profane, originally published by Last Gasp in 1976. That volume primarily consisted of “We Fellow Traveleers,” a more mythic recasting of the autobiographical struggle of Binky Brown, which the sampler does not reprint. The sampler does include such material from Sacred and Profane as “Sweet Void of Youth” and a sketch of how purgatory works, as well as the covers of that publication and of Green’s Show and Tell Comics, published by the Print Mint in 1973.

By the early 1980’s, Green had almost entirely left the field of comics to make a living as a sign painter. However, he continued to work on two comics: The Sign Game, in Signs of the Times, and Musical Legends, in Pulse magazine. He also published material in Raw, edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, and Weirdo, edited by Robert Crumb. Some of the material in the Binky Brown Sampler may have come from these sources, although the sampler gives no information about the original publication of the comic work. A prose piece in the sampler began as an essay in The Sun magazine.

Plot

Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is a thinly veiled autobiography concerning Green’s lifelong struggle with his Catholic upbringing and, although the diagnosis was made long after the 1972 publication of the comic, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Green explores these issues through his fictionalized avatar, the adolescent Binky Brown. After Binky enters puberty, his religious guilt over his sexual thoughts and feelings becomes a major focus of obsession. He comes to believe that sexual rays are emitted from his body—at first from his penis, then his fingers and toes as well—and, eventually, any tube-shaped or even rectangular object; if these rays intersect with any church or holy statue, he will be guilty of sin.

However, while these sexual issues are the most obvious of Binky Brown’s problems, in some ways, they are the least important. Perhaps because adolescence is frequently a time of obsession and neurosis, these problems interweave seamlessly with problems with which many underground comics readers could identify: intimidation by older and more physically developed boys, helpless adoration of girls of higher social status mixed with a growing misogyny, and desires to be admired by parents for being good and by girls for being tough.

Deciding he is inevitably damned, Binky rejects the Catholic Church, but he is still haunted by guilt. A page depicts “various avenues of experiment” undergone between 1959 and 1971, including “Beer,” “Speed,” “Crime,” “Hesse Novels,” “Yoga,” “Pot,” “Mysticism,” “Psychiatry,” “Painting,” “The Blues,” and “Acid.” One turning point occurs at the end of an acid trip in 1971, when a statue of the Virgin Mary tags Binky, saying “You’re it!” “She finally talked,” Binky says, “and turned out to be the bogeyman. Haw haw. The bogeyman who is really that l’il ol’ ventriloquist, me!” With that insight, Binky buys dozens of cheap statues of the Virgin Mary and smashes most of them, after which the rays disappear.

In reality, as the prose piece at the end of the sampler shows, Green’s problems, the result of brain chemistry and an inability to socialize, were not that easily resolved. However, the symbolic ending of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is in many ways justified, as Green notes that he has since learned to manage his obsessive-compulsive disorder and overcome many of the specific issues stemming from his Catholic childhood.

Other pieces in the Binky Brown Sampler expand upon this story. “Bathos Playhouse: Right Field” features Sister Virginia from Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, and “Binky Brown in the Taboo Gown” shows his distress over the fact that his “lucky shirt” is the same color as Christ’s gown in the film The Robe (1953). Other short features focus more on typical adolescent heartache and embarrassment, such as enduring physical-education classes. “Sweet Void of Youth” depicts Green’s development as a cartoonist and artist, using the same mostly literal yet highly symbolic approach as Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary.

Characters

•Binky Brown is an adolescent whose undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder and complicated relationship with the Catholic Church cause him a great deal of mental and emotional distress. He serves as a reflection of his time and place, the Midwest of the 1950’s and after. A sympathetic character obviously based on Green, Binky is the effective opposite of a superhero; his greatest accomplishment is to become more or less normal.

•Other characters are all minor, important only insofar as they affect Binky’s life. These include his father and mother, his family’s African American maid, the nuns and priests, the girl he has a crush on, the tough boy for whom he does artwork when they are both in grade school, and his school principal. The reader is told only bits about each. For instance, all that is said about Binky’s mother is that she reads and sings sad songs while cleaning. A one-page panel about his father is titled “Great Moments in Alcoholism,” but nothing about his drinking is brought up in Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, as relevant as the topic might seem. Sometimes, the artwork provides the most information, such as in the case of Father Runkem, the demented-looking priest in Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary who exacerbates Binky’s guilt. Some of the more striking characters are symbolic; “Sweet Surrender,” a short piece in the sampler, features Binky’s dog, Nostalgia, who wears a theater usher’s costume, imprisons Binky in a shoe, and constantly shows him movies based on embarrassing moments from his childhood.

Artistic Style

Green’s artwork is idiosyncratic, expressive, eclectic, and experimental. His skill advances with experience, as the juxtaposition of earlier and later works in the sampler demonstrates, though it does not change radically. Throughout the sampler, Green uses a quintessential comic book style that features exaggerated figures with simplified but amazingly individual and communicative faces. The work is well designed for black-and-white publication, using drawn textures and blocks of black or white to give depth and detail. Green’s panels are not packed like those of the early MAD magazine or his underground compatriots such as S. Clay Wilson, but they always provide an important background, either realistic or symbolic, rather than a stark stage for the characters. The layout of the panels ranges from traditional to highly inventive.

The back cover of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, reprinted in the sampler, makes clear Green’s artistic influences in popular culture, cartoons, and historical works of art. The devil, masquerading as the Virgin Mary, has a snout with a bulbous nose, similar to that of a cartoon canine, and wears 1950’s-style men’s socks with garters; a background city street is dominated by an advertising billboard and fast-food franchises; and the devil is being bitten on the calf by a lion that resembles the green lion of alchemical imagery. These incongruous approaches work together throughout Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary and the other pieces in the Binky Brown Sampler to create Green’s own iconography. For instance, in one panel, in which Binky considers the atom bomb and God’s Last Judgment, the skeleton with an hourglass pictured over his head would not be out of place in a medieval or Renaissance woodcut. One panel in “Sweet Void of Youth” presents a coherent allegory, with “Fame,” an angel somewhat like that in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), and “Oblivion Way” depicted in the background.

Themes

The most obvious theme of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary and the Binky Brown Sampler as a whole is the conflict between sexuality and the Catholic Church. In interviews from the 1980’s and 1990’s, Green states that he no longer considers Catholicism the enemy, both because it has changed and because he feels that hatred and fear of sexuality is not inherent to the doctrine. Yet, Binky Brown continues to speak to the widespread conflict between sexuality and religion.

Other themes are deserving of attention as well. As an autobiography, the Binky Brown Sampler constantly investigates the role of social and personal history in the development of identity. In addition to Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, other stories in the sampler explore this theme. For instance, “Scribe” is a history of lettering that begins with prehistoric pictographs, forming a diptych with the more personal “Sweet Void of Youth.”

Another theme is the paradoxical way in which myths help humans understand their lives but also mislead them. For instance, “Binky Brown Meets Olympic Legends” concerns the mother of a friend, a one-time Olympic runner, and the sad contrast between her life as Binky imagines it, based on an Olympic Legends trading card, and as he finds it in reality. The general themes of finding one’s purpose in life and the place of art in life intersect in this autobiographical work.

Although the works in the sampler depict sex only once and barely refer to drugs, they consistently support counterculture values of truth, freedom, rebellion, introspection, and experimentation, in life and in art. They are also almost never explicitly political, although the end of “Scribe” depicts concerns about war.

Impact

Both Crumb and Spiegelman credit Green with initiating the genre of autobiographical comics, one that has become almost as entrenched as the superhero genre. Although many taboos in comics had already been broken by 1972, no one had yet put the result into a coherent personal story. Green paved the way for Spiegelman’s Maus (1986) by using the comic form to provide both intimacy and distance in autobiography. Just as Spiegelman uses animal characters to make the Holocaust visible yet bearable, Green uses cartooning and imagery from various sources to force readers into Binky’s head while still maintaining a necessary perspective. One of the few underground artists trained in fine art, Green may also have been influential in his artistic use of a range of sources and iconography, from 1950’s middle-American signage to Renaissance art. Green further anticipated and preceded the mix of myth and mundane life, later prominent in the work of Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and others.

Further Reading

Brown, Chester. I Never Liked You (1994).

Green, Justin. Sacred and Profane (1976).

Gregory, Roberta. Naughty Bits (1991-2004).

Kominsky, Aline, Robert Crumb, and Sophie Crumb. The Complete Dirty Laundry Comics (1993).

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986).

Bibliography

Green, Justin. “Comics and Catholics: Mark Burbey Interviews Justin Green.”Interview by Mark Burbey. The Comics Journal 104 (January, 1986): 37-49.

Levin, Bob. “Rice, Beans, and Justin Greens.” The Comics Journal 203 (April, 1998): 101-107.

Manning, Shaun. “Justin Green on Binky Brown.” Comic Book Resources, January 22, 2010. http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=24518.

Von Busak, Richard. “Memoirs of a Catholic Boyhood: Birth of the Comic Book Autobiography.” Metroactive,1995. http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/10.12.95/comics-9541.html.