A lost classic of underground cartooning, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin
Mary is Justin Green's autobiographical portrayal of his struggle with
religion and his own neuroses. Binky Brown is a young Catholic battling all
the usual problems of adolescence?puberty, parents, and the fear that the
strange ray of energy emanating from his private parts will strike a picture
of the Virgin Mary. Deeply confessional, with artwork that veers wildly
between formalist and hallucinogenic, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary
is the controversial masterpiece that invented the autobiographical graphic
novel.
?Justin Green he's out of his mind. I love every stroke of his nervous pen,
every tortured scratch he ever scrawled. He was among the top storytelling
artists of the first wave of ?underground" comics, a darkly humorous social
commentator, and the FIRST, absolutely the FIRST EVER cartoonist to draw
highly personal autobiographical comics. Binky Brown started many other
cartoonists along the same path, myself included. Few have come close to him
in revealing themselves in this medium. For me, there's nothing more
enjoyable than the confessions of a tortured soul, if the story is
well-told, entertaining, honest, and then funny on top of it. If that's what
you're looking for, and if you like it in comic book form, Justin Green is
the first and the best!"
?R. Crumb
?Thank God that it's getting harder to imagine a time when comics were a
lowly commercial hack-job for illustrators who couldn't find work anywhere
else. It's even harder to imagine the effect of a comic book in such a
cultural climate by an artist who tore himself to pieces right on the page,
trying to get at the core of something that was literally consuming him, but
this is what Justin Green did. With Binky Brown, comics went practically
overnight from being an artform that saw from the outside in to one that
sees from the inside out. His internal struggle can practically be felt in
the drawings themselves, the style sometimes changing from panel to
panel?sometimes even within the panels themselves?all in an effort to simply
arrive at The Truth. Comics wouldn't be what they are today without this
book, and this new edition places it in its proper place in the comics
literary canon. Thank God for Binky Brown. And thank God for Justin Green."
?Chris Ware
?It must have been hell for you to get it exactly right? I could see that
the work came from a permanently damaged brain."
?Kurt Vonnegut
?I like it very much, but I don't get the slang."
?Federico Fellini