(Image source: Internet Archive)

In the wake of World War II, several high-profile teen murder cases in the United States sparked a moral panic over juvenile delinquency. Popular psychology books like Dr. Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and congressional hearings placed the blame squarely on horror and crime comic books like Tales from the Crypt. Hoping to save themselves from lawsuits and government regulation, established publishers created the self-censoring Comics Code Authority, banning depictions of sexuality, violence, drug use, dead bodies, and even horror staples like vampires and werewolves, giving rise to the modern dominance of superhero comics in the United States.

Starting in the 1960s, a generation of cartoonists – including household names like Robert Crumb and future Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman – who had grown up on the now defanged medium sought to rebel against the status quo and U.S. obscenity law with independently printed and distributed work that pushed the envelope of what was possible and publishable. Exerting an outsized influence on the then-emerging counterculture, these “underground” cartoonists encouraged each other to create increasingly more radical, pornographic, and psychedelic comics.

Against this backdrop, in 1972, a 40-page story emerged that helped change the history of the medium, inspiring the modern genre of autobiographical comics with perhaps the first spiritual memoir in comic form. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary by the late Justin Green (1945 – 2022) helped demonstrate that radical vulnerability and the confession of one’s most personal secrets can be even more transgressive and transformative – for oneself and others – than the shock value of hyperviolence and lurid sexuality.

Raised by a Catholic mother and a Jewish father outside Chicago in the 1950s, Green attended Catholic school for some of his most formative years and suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder for his entire life (enduring decades without a diagnosis). Attending the Rhode Island School of Design in an era where his talent for representational art was overlooked as “illustration” in favor of the then-in-vogue Abstract Expressionism, Green spent his senior year abroad in Rome hoping to find inspiration. Unable to connect with the (primarily religious) masterpieces of Renaissance art, he had an epiphany at a local newsstand when he encountered reprinted American underground cartoons for the first time. He couldn’t stop laughing.

After moving to San Francisco, Green began to experiment with cartooning, contributing to prominent anthologies like Arcade, Bijou Funnies, The Yellow Dog and Laugh in the Dark, where the character of Binky Brown, a stand-in for Green narrating humiliating moments from his early adolescence, first appeared. Following some initial positive reactions to the short material, Green set out to write a longer piece, spending seven months hanging Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary page by completed page on a clothesline in his apartment kitchen.

This comic would go on to become one of the most famous and influential of its era, jump-starting the now pervasive genre of autobiographical comics and, most recently, helping earn its creator posthumous induction into the Eisner Award Hall of Fame at the 2023 San Diego Comic Con this past July.

Binky Brown and The Virgin Mary

A religious memoir in the form of a confession under torture – the first panel shows a naked, blindfolded Green suspended upside down from the ceiling by his arms like an inquisition victim, drawing panels onto a blank page with a pen in his teeth – Binky Brown is a tale of sickness and coming of age that blends a child’s perspective on Catholic dogma with an obsessive drive toward superstition and ritual. A therapeutic working through of some of his strangest delusions, Green, “gets so close to some combination of religious fervor and psychosis that… you can’t take your eyes away from it,” underground comics scholar and author of Rebel Visions, Patrick Rosenkranz, said in conversation for this article.

Starting at age 13, about the age OCD symptoms typically manifest, the “story” of Binky Brown is a catalogue of the character’s neuroses – from his concern about the right way to walk down the stairs to whether the atomic bomb is in fact a sign of the impending Final Judgement. Riddled with paranoia and anxiety, one of the opening incidents involves Binky being chastised by his mother for accidentally breaking a Madonna statue. Obsessed with the concept of sin and searching for hidden signs of his salvation or damnation, like receiving a black gumball from a machine, one of the central questions of the text is posed by a panel caption as the protagonist sits in a confessional: Is Binky Brown “Anal Compulsive or Mystic”?

(Interior panel of Binky Brown. Image source: Artist’s Edition Index)

Perhaps the most famous image from Binky Brown comes in the form of the destructive “rays” which extend from Binky’s penis, fingers, and feet—all of which appear to Binky as phalluses. A visualization of Green’s truly felt but otherwise invisible delusion – explained in text through the metaphor of single point perspective in drawing – the threat of intersection between these rays and statues of the Virgin Mary and Catholic churches is both existentially terrible and implicitly erotic. His fear of his own libidinal power and the possibility of its offense against both God and the mother of God becomes an oppressive burden, limiting his ability to move, think, or even pray for fear that the rays from his penis fingers might point in the wrong direction.

The final pages of Binky Brown focus on the now 26-year-old protagonist living in San Francisco, still grappling with his symptoms. Finding himself at the mercy of a Virgin Mary statue outside the Mission Dolores, Binky attempts to break her hold over him once and for all. Stripping down to his underwear in a circle of a dozen mass-produced Madonna statues, he declares his hands to be hands, his penis to be a penis, and the statues to be “matter, which I shatter,” smashing all the idols except for one which he misses in his madness. Placing it on his window ledge, he pledges to construct new, healthier beliefs around this Virgin.

According to Green, this event, like most other incidents from the story, was based on a real attempted ritual cure for his symptoms. According to Rosenkranz in our interview, however, “It didn’t work.”

Binky Brown Between Heaven and Earth

One of the most striking elements of Binky Brown that made it so powerful for contemporary readers who had grown up Catholic was the degree to which Green’s delusions aligned with what they had been taught in church and Catholic school. As Green described in an interview with Patrick Rosenkranz in 1973, “According to the Catholic religion the Virgin Mary is a physical entity existing in heaven… this is what I was taught as a kid.”

In his book Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, religious studies scholar Robert Orsi discusses the notion of divine presence in the images and veneration of the Virgin Mary within the American Catholic worldview of the 1950s. Per his description, “The Virgin Mary transforms looking into a devotional activity,” because of the promise of her immediate presence to her faithful through objects and practices from recitations of the rosary to the mass produced statues and shrines scattered across suburban yards and car dashboards. To believers, the Virgin is both in heaven and in her images, watching over them like a mother would, serving both as a protective power as well as a reminder of purity and chastity.

In a sense, Green’s symptoms – informed and shaped by his Catholic education – were theologically correct but torturous to live with. As Orsi describes in his discussion of Catholic education in the period, “The making of the realness of a religious world is not a benign process; religious reality achieved in children’s bodies (and reverberating in the memories of the adults these children become) did not make the world safer for these children, more comforting, or… more meaningful. It made it real.”

This awful proximity to and presence of the divine, in the form of The Virgin Mary, not only drove Green from the church but to inscribe his experiences on paper. The truth is that Binky Brown is not just a confession of his neuroses and symptoms. It, like its iconoclastic climax, is an attempt at ritual exorcism to drive the internalized Virgin from his mind. As his wife and fellow cartoonist Carol Tyler told me, “[this] was his attempt to try to gain control over the power [of the iconic].”

Tarot As Talisman

In his 1973 interview with Patrick Rosenkranz, Green acknowledged that the first parts of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary he completed were its front and back covers. Both borrow and play with the symbolism of Tarot cards (which Green described as “a multidimensional textbook of the occult sciences written in universal picture symbols” in his contribution to the anthology Occult Laff Parade the same year).

On the front, the Virgin Mary stands over a kneeling, grimacing Binky, urging him to confess his impure thoughts as a flesh-colored serpent passes between his legs. Per Green, this scene invokes the imagery of the Strength card, which usually depicts a maiden holding the jaws of a lion open. On the back cover, Binky has been replaced by a lion wearing a mantle marked with the letter ‘B’ and which bites the Virgin on the leg, causing her to drop her mask and reveal a wolf-faced boogeyman beneath. In the background, lightning strikes and destroys the striped bucket sign of a Kentucky Fried Chicken, an allusion to the Tarot’s Tower card, and a rich recurring image for Green for whom the fast-food franchise seems to serve as a secular metaphor for the organized mediation of spiritual experience. In the comic, Binky draws a cartoon for class comparing the effect of confession on sin to making sausage in a meat grinder, and Green’s later graphic work more than once features a grinning Colonel Sanders cutting off chicken heads.

The deliberate use and inversion of Tarot symbolism can be read as a coded or even talismanic intent behind the project. With this confession, Binky (Green) seeks to strike back and break the power the Virgin holds over him. However, as Carol Tyler makes clear, “[Justin] did not hate the Virgin… He hated what was going on in his head.” In his own account from 1973, Green seems to agree with this assessment, saying both that the Virgin had become conflated with his feminine self and that “I was not seeing her at all for what she was, but that I had a demonic vision of her that stemmed from my demonic vision of woman.” This is what he hoped to expel from inside himself by sharing with others.

Unfortunately, as his wife says, “There’s no end to the story. In reality, there was no final thing and it was over. OCD is lifelong.” Describing their lives together decades later, she said that Green never fully got over his fear of harming the Virgin Mary, taking long, winding routes on drives to avoid contact with any statues of the Madonna.

Eroticism of the Wound

Strikingly, the depiction of Binky’s rays in Binky Brown can be seen as a reversal of the stigmata—the miraculous appearance of Christ’s wounds on the body of saints—often depicted in Renaissance art as lines extending from heaven or angels to a holy person’s body, as in Giotto’s painting Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata.

This allusion appears to be intentional or at least unconsciously implicit, as Green explained in 1973, “I think the origin of my rays was from the sensuality that I was unable to suppress in a Christ-like fashion … One of the strong panels was the sequence where I was running on the hill with newly formed rays asking how could I reconcile the fact that my god had nails through his hands and feet and I had rays from mine.”

The connection between sensuality and wounding continues elsewhere in the text. One of the most interesting pages shows Binky’s first orgasm, induced by scratching off a toy pig’s pink coating and exposing the black rubber underneath after seeing a painting of Custer’s Last Stand. Custer’s scalped head at the center of the page’s top panel forms a familiar shape in Christian iconography: the ovular, vaginal vesica piscis, often used as a frame around apparitions of the Virgin Mary or to depict the side wound of Christ.

The wound may be seen as a sign of openness, a peeling back of the protective dermis to arrive at the vital, vulnerable interior. From another perspective, it can symbolize the penetration and permeation of another power into the material. In Orsi’s estimation, the truth is somewhere in between the two: meaning seeks to create “a story that is said to link heaven and earth…” and “meaning making is wounding.” For Green, who repeatedly fears impregnating the Virgin Mary, his painful, wounding rays seem to symbolize the mystic act of being penetrated by and penetrating into the divine.

By holding open his metaphorical wounds and outlandish perceptions to outsiders, Green puts himself on display in a manner akin to a kind of perversion, allowing others to see the depths of both his suffering and psychospiritual conflict. In committing this radically transgressive act of confession, perhaps the most transgressive act of all, Green not only stood out from his contemporary peers, he helped inspire new genres and generations.

The After Life of Binky Brown

As Green told Rosenkranz in 1973, “Binky Brown is dead.” Though compelled to publish Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, once finished, the energy drained from him. Despite a few further Binky Brown strips, such as the one collected in 1976’s The Sacred & Profane, Green mostly moved onto other projects perhaps out of the worry, “I might come to be identified as the neurotic Catholic cartoonist… and that just isn’t true.”

Although Green, who died in April 2022, eventually took up sign painting as a full-time profession, he never left comics, contributing funny and insightful entries to many noted anthologies, including Comix Book (Marvel’s short-lived experiment in publishing some of the highest profile underground creators), as well as publishing a monthly comic on his life and observations as a sign painter in trade magazine Signs of the Times for more than 20 years. Though he would delve into related metaphysical and spiritual themes, notably in his surreal and symbolically rich We Fellow Traveleers series from the mid-1970s, he never delved into the same realms as personally again.

(Justin Green painting. Image source: The Comics Journal)

“He was embarrassed by that comic,” recalled his wife, perhaps because of how much of himself he put into it. Or, in Patrick Rosenkranz’s view, “[Green] didn’t want to hear any more [about Binky Brown]… in some ways he felt it was like an albatross around his neck.”

Comics as Confessional

Green was far from the first or last to confront religion in comic form, even among the undergrounds. Two of the earliest underground comics from 1964 were religious parodies, God Nose by Jack “Jaxon” Jackson and The Adventures of Jesus by Foolbert Sturgeon. In 1973, the year after Binky Brown’s publication, Robert Crumb and others put out the famous (and filthy) anthology Tales from the Leather Nun. Focused on mocking religion as another method of social control, these texts may have had personal roots but were ultimately uninterested in personal spiritual or psychological reflection. This self-analytic impulse, according to Art Spiegelman, creator of the Holocaust memoir comic Maus, was Green’s greatest innovation and where his influence on the medium can be felt most clearly to this day.

Spiegelman cites Green as critical to his own move from raunchy parodies like “The Viper” to intensely personal work like Prisoner on the Hell Planet, which dealt with the fallout of a bad acid trip as well as his mother’s suicide. He notes, “Justin turned comic book boxes into intimate, secular confession booths and thereby profoundly changed the history of comics.”

The impulse to examine and unpack the personal has taken on a rich life in comics over the last 50 years, inspired both by Green and those who followed him, from his contemporaries like Spiegelman and the late Aline Kominsky-Crumb to the work of Alison Bechdel in Fun Home or Joe Matt’s Peepshow. Still, perhaps the most direct continuation of Binky Brown came in 2003’s Blankets by Craig Thompson – a personal memoir of sexuality, abuse, young love, and being raised Evangelical.

Like Green, Thompson grapples with the problem of “how can sexuality be reconciled with piety,” and Blankets is ultimately the story of his loss of faith, serving as a confession to his parents as to how and why he left Evangelical Christianity. As religious studies scholar Ken Koltun-Fromm notes in his book Drawing On Religion, both texts are ultimately about their creators’ transition from a child’s conception of religion to an adult’s ideas and the displacement of self that takes place along the way. In a very real sense, the loss of the child-like reality of God is the same as the end of faith for many people. Both Blankets and Binky Brown serve to demonstrate the trauma of the start and end of faith, the loss of innocence, and the human need to redefine meaning for oneself.

For all its unusual focus on penis rays and obsessive ritual action, the impact of Binky Brown comes from its common emotional core. Where many other contemporary works are less immediate to modern audiences who no longer remember the Vietnam War, the Nixon Administration, and when Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was considered vulgar, Justin Green’s personal exploration of shame, faith, and mental illness has only grown in relevance. His insight and his belief in cartooning’s capacity not just to titillate but to serve as a medium of mystical therapy generated a new genre of confessional cartooning, combining memoir and exhibitionism into a kind of self-crucifixion where the revelation of one’s pain and trauma can become transcendence.

Andrew Lenoir is a Brooklyn-based writer and the proprietor of Ellipsis Rare Books. A graduate from Brown University with an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, his work has appeared in America Magazine, The Brown Journal of History, Lovecraftian Proceedings, Atlas Obscura, All That’s Interesting, Mental Floss, Fine Books and Collections Magazine, Screenrant as well as the anthology Arthur Machen: Critical Essays.