page_title: Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary
section_title: Style and analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary / Style and analysis
caption_attribution_description: English: Two panels from a Dream of the Rarebit Fiend episode from 1905-02-25 by American cartoonist Winsor McCay
context_page_description: Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is a comic-book story by American cartoonist Justin Green, published in 1972. Green takes the persona of Binky Brown to tell of the "compulsive neurosis" with which he struggled in his youth and which he blamed on his strict Roman Catholic upbringing. Green was later diagnosed with obsessive–compulsive disorder and came to see his problems in that light.
  In the story, sinful thoughts that he cannot control torment Binky Brown; to his alarm, phallic objects become literal penises and project what he calls "pecker rays" at religious objects such as churches and statues of the Virgin Mary. He develops an internal set of rules to obey and punishments for breaking them. The torment does not subside, and he comes to reject the Catholic Church in defiance as the source of it. The work combines a wide variety of visual and narrative techniques in a style that echoes the torment of its protagonist.
  Binky Brown had an immediate influence on contemporaries in underground comix: such cartoonists as Aline Kominsky, Robert Crumb, and Art Spiegelman soon turned to producing similarly confessional works.
context_section_description: The story takes the form of a guilt-ridden confession.  In the opening, the adult Binky hangs over a sickle, bound from head to toe and listening to Ave Maria as he draws with a pen in his mouth.  He declares his intention: "to purge myself of the compulsive neurosis which I have served since I officially left Catholicism on Halloween, 1958."  He justifies the work to communicate with the "many others [who] are slaves to their neuroses" and who, despite believing themselves isolated, number so many that they "would entwine the globe many times over in a vast chain of common suffering".
  Though Green built Binky Brown on an autobiographical base he fabricated many scenes—such as one in which Binky is bullied by two third-graders—"to suggest or convey a whole generalized idea about some subjective feeling, such as order or fear or guilt".  To critic Charles Hatfield Binky Brown displays a "radical subjectivity" that calls into question the notion of objectivity in autobiography.  The presentation is insistently subjective and non-literal in its visuals.
  Despite the heavy tone, humor is prominent.  The work is conscious of its own creation—Green's drawing of it frames the narrative proper and there are constant reminders of it throughout.  Green patterned the opening after those featuring the Crypt-Keeper in EC Comics' Tales from the Crypt series from the 1950s.  Green used the adult Binky as the narrator of the captions and as a way to tie together the past and present timeframes. There is a disconnect in that the narrator refers to his younger self as "he".  Other references to comics include a Sinstopper's Guidebook, which alludes to Dick Tracy's Crimestopper's Textbook and a cartoon by Robert Crumb in the background.
  Green employs numerous Catholic symbols, such as a word balloon adorned with symbols of Christ's martyrdom to represent the depth of Binky's desperation.  Catholic works such as a catechism and Treasure Chest parochial comics appear throughout the work.
  Despite strict censorship in other media in the US, explicit sexuality was common in underground comix.  Binky Brown was the first work of autobiographical comics to depict explicit sexuality: penises appear throughout, and Binky masturbates in one scene.  The central symbol of the penis recurs sometimes subtly as in the images of pencils used to craft the work, and more often explicitly, as every phallic-like object Green sees because a literal "pecker ray"-projecting penis in Binky's mind.
  Art Spiegelman described the artwork as "quirky and ungainly".  Though it appears awkward, Green put considerable effort into elements such as graphical perspective, and draws attention to his craft by depicting himself drawing and by placing the drawing manuals Perspective and Fun With a Pencil in the backgrounds. In contrast to the mundane tales of Harvey Pekar, another prominent early practitioner of autobiographical comics, Green makes wide use of visual metaphors.  In Binky Brown symbols become literal, as when Binky imagines himself becoming a snowball hurtling into Hell or as a fish chased by a police officer who wears a crucifix.  The work displays a wide array of visual techniques: diagrammatic arrows; mock-scholarly documentation; a great variety in panel size, composition, and layout; and a range of contrasting mechanical and organic rendering techniques, such as screentone alongside dense hand-drawn hatching.  The symbolic and technical collide where the Virgin Mary becomes the vanishing point of Binky's converging "pecker rays".
  Critic Joseph Witek sees the shifting between different modes of traditional comics representation at times presents a literalist view through "windowlike panels", and at others "representational, symbolic, allegorical, associative, and allusive", an approach analogous to "Binky Brown's massively and chaotically overdetermined subjectivity".  Witek finds roots for the fractured psychological landscape of Binky Brown in the comics of earlier eras: the unrestrained psyches in the dreams of Winsor McCay's Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, the 
caption: Precursors in comics to Binky Brown's unrestricted psyche include Winsor McCay's Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (February 25, 1905).
exif: {}