Binky Brown Has Met the Holy Virgin Mary

Justin Green, 1945-2022

Justin Green died on April 23. I’m coming a little late to the memorial, but I wanted to mention it because he was an important artist whose work meant a lot to me. First, a little art history. Until the 1960s, comics all over the world were a commercial endeavor. They existed to sell newspapers and comic books. Then, more-or-less simultaneously, Japanese, European and American cartoonists became much more self-conscious about the work they were doing. Work became much more personal, much more of a way to express themselves. While there were many artistically significant comics artists prior to the 1960s, what those 60s artists were doing was inherently different from what came before. In the US, this change was represented by the underground comics movement. Justin Green was part of this movement. He had been an art student, then had a crisis about what was the best way for him to express himself.

He joined the underground movement in the early 70s, when it was at its height. In 1972, he published the work he is most famous for Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. It is a very surreal first person account of how Green broke from the Catholic Church (Green calls himself Binky Brown). This may have been the first confessional, autobiographical comic ever produced in the world. It was definitely the most influential. Après Justin Green, le deluge.

These images are from the deluxe, hardcover edition of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, published by McSweeney’s in 2009. They shot the art from Green’s originals, which is why the pages are yellowed and the white-out is so very white. It’s a fancy printing choice that reminds us that comics art is made by hand by real people. It helps restore the “aura” that Walter Benjamin identified in his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

Green subsequently realized that what was wrong with him was a mental illness: OCD. But he didn’t have a word for it in 1972.

The first Justin Green comic I ever bought was the oversized sequel to Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, Sacred & Profane.

In this comic, Green gets explicit over the conflict between fine art and popular art.

Since Green’s death, many excellent obituaries have been written about him. He has become an official “renegade neurotic,” as he predicted in Sacred & Profane.

I saw a piece of original Justin Green art offered at an auction years ago when I had some mad money to spend. I bought it . It is a piece he contributed to Morse’s Funnies. Albert Morse was a hippie lawyer in San Francisco who represented a lot of underground comics artists in intellectual property cases.c

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