Said Art Spiegelman, quoted in "Justin Green, Who Put Himself Into His Underground Cartoons, Dies at 76/'Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, his epic autobiographical story of Catholic guilt and neurosis, 'made comics grow up,' a colleague said" (NYT).
The first page of Mr. Green’s book shows Binky naked, his hands bound and his feet shackled, confessing: “O, my readers, the saga of Binky Brown is not intended solely for your entertainment, but also to purge myself of the compulsive neurosis which I have serviced since I officially left Catholicism on Halloween, 1958.”
Binky’s misadventures begin when, as a boy, he breaks a statue of the Virgin Mary while playing baseball inside his house. The book takes him through young manhood, as he deals with bullies, nuns (“fascistic penguins,” in his words), priests, fears stoked by supernatural church doctrines that are “asserted as empirical fact,” his impure thoughts and his sexuality.
It's just by chance that I've begun the day writing about the Weather Underground and underground comics. To mark this accidental theme, I'll show you this definition of "underground" from the OED:
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Justin Green was a cartoonist extraordinaire, a warped genius who influenced the more-or-less father of underground comics, Robert Crumb to begin making comics about himself. He was also a great draughtsman and, for decades, a dedicated professional sign painter. He wrote and drew one-page cartoon biographies of musical luminaries for Tower Records in-house magazine PULSE.
Another prominent comic book artist also died this week, as well, Neal Adams, whose sophisticated and tour de force draughtsmanship and page layouts took the superhero comics world by storm in the late 60s. (I later came to be bored by his exemplary, but, to me, facile drawing. It was too melodramatic.)
Maybe he made comics grow up, but it sounds like he never fully did so himself. Obsessing over your own childhood for too long just isn't a recipe for a happy adulthood.
Most interesting artists are mostly nuts.
In other words, he never escaped his Catholic upbringing.
I was never that into underground culture. It seemed disposable, trash culture. Maybe that accounts for its appeal.
In the abstract, rebel comix and all the rest had some appeal, but did they measure up to the claims made for them or really amount to much?
We can return to them and see in them part of the spirit of the times, and that also is a lot of their appeal for people now, even if underground culture wasn't very much in itself.
It's just by chance that I've begun the day writing about the Weather Underground and underground comics.
Elon Musk has the Boring Company.
There is a clear opportunity for a trifecta.
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