A short life of the author
Justin Green (1945–2022) is the founding figure of autobiographical comics — the cartoonist whose Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) opened the door through which Art Spiegelman, Harvey Pekar, Alison Bechdel, and every subsequent artist who used comics to tell their own story would walk. Before Binky Brown, underground comix were about sex, drugs, satire, and transgression. After it, they could also be about the self — about mental illness, childhood trauma, religious guilt, and the dark recesses of the individual psyche. Spiegelman has explicitly and repeatedly credited Green’s work as the direct inspiration for Maus, which is to say that Green stands at the origin point of the most celebrated graphic novel in history.
Life and Career
Green grew up Catholic in Chicago, attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and moved to San Francisco in the late 1960s, where he became part of the underground comix scene alongside R. Crumb, Robert Williams, S. Clay Wilson, and other artists publishing through Last Gasp and Rip Off Press. His early work appeared in underground comix anthologies and shared the movement’s countercultural energy, but Green was temperamentally different from his peers — more introspective, more tortured, and more interested in the psychological than the provocative.
The underground comix movement provided both the medium and the permission: its refusal of the Comics Code Authority’s censorship meant that cartoonists could depict anything, and most of them used that freedom for explicit sex, drug humor, and social satire. Green used it to turn the medium inward — to depict, with agonizing honesty, the workings of a mind in distress.
Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972)
Binky Brown is a 44-page comic book that depicts Green’s experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder — specifically, a form of OCD intertwined with Catholic guilt in which the sufferer is tormented by intrusive blasphemous thoughts and develops elaborate rituals to prevent imaginary “rays of sin” from reaching religious images.
The comic was unprecedented in its confessional directness. Green/Binky Brown does not merely describe OCD; he draws it — showing the invisible rays emanating from his body toward churches, the mental contortions required to navigate a city full of religious buildings, the exhausting rituals of counting, avoidance, and physical adjustment that consume his waking life. The visual language Green invented to depict these invisible forces — wavy lines, distorted perspectives, symbolic imagery — made the experience of OCD visible and physical in a way that prose description could not.
The work contains humor — Green was a gifted comic artist, and the absurdity of the condition is part of its horror — but it is fundamentally a document of suffering. Green later said that creating the comic was itself a therapeutic act, and that the process of externalizing his symptoms in visual form gave him some measure of control over them.
The influence was immediate and lasting. Spiegelman wrote that without Binky Brown, Maus would not have existed — that Green’s demonstration that comics could be a medium for psychological confession of the most serious kind gave him permission to use comics to tell his father’s Holocaust story. R. Crumb called it “the very first autobiographical comic.” Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and David B.’s Epileptic all descend from the door Green opened.
Later Career
Green’s career after Binky Brown was more modest. He produced occasional short comics, contributed to anthologies, and developed a second career as a sign painter — a craft he practiced for decades and documented in columns for various publications, including Sign Business magazine. His sign-painting work was meticulous and beautiful, and it connected to the same obsessive attention to craft that characterized his comics.
He never produced another work of the ambition or impact of Binky Brown, which gives his career a one-hit-wonder quality that is both accurate (in terms of output) and misleading (in terms of influence). The single work was so foundational that it alone secured his place in comics history.
Green died in 2022. His influence-to-fame ratio is extreme — he is arguably the most important cartoonist that most people have never heard of.
Key Works
- Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972)
Collecting Green
The original 1972 printing of Binky Brown (Last Gasp) is the key collectible — an underground comix format publication that was printed in modest numbers and is genuinely scarce in fine condition. Fine copies bring $100–$400. The McSweeney’s hardcover reissue (2009, with an introduction by Spiegelman) is also collected and brings $25–$50. Green’s original art pages are extremely rare and sought-after — any original Binky Brown page would be a significant acquisition.