Justin Green, a pioneer whose Highland Park childhood led to a new confessional kind of comic, dies at 76

Justin Green, a Chicago native whose early underground comix of the 1960s and 1970s influenced several generations of artists to adapt their most painful personal experiences into comics, died recently. He was 76 and had been in hospice for five days. He had colon cancer, said artist and writer Carol Tyler, his wife of 38 years who announced his death via social media April 23. He was “a great one for thinking differently about everything,” she said, though in the end, she added, he never had a colonoscopy and thought taking vitamins would be enough.

He was an enigma, even by the standards of a profession full of enigmas.

He was born in July, 1945 and grew up rich and painfully polite in Highland Park, though his signature comic was “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary,” a transgressive work full of graphic sexual imagery and angst drawn from his childhood. On its first page, Green (as Binky Brown) is bound and dangling by his ankles from a dank basement wall, addressing the reader:

The Saga of Binky Brown is not intended solely for your entertainment, but also to purge myself of the compulsive neurosis which I have served since I officially left Catholicism on Halloween, 1958.

What follows was a sweaty, 43-page account of youthful guilt, self-mockery and all-consuming obsessiveness (he would suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder his entire life), so evocative he would receive a postcard from a fan named Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote: “It must have been hell for you to get it exactly right. Now I know what it’s like to have a Catholic upbringing.” When Green gathered the courage to call him, Vonnegut added: “I could see that the work came from a permanently damaged brain.”

Green would later described the act of writing “Binky Brown” as an “exorcism”; it was never lost on him that a famous cousin from Chicago, William Friedkin, directed “The Exorcist.” The book ends with Green sitting in his underwear surrounded by statues of the Virgin Mary, which he smashes, metaphorically freeing himself of organized religion.

A 1973 Tribune headline for an article on underground comix (already describing Green as a pioneer) reflected the mainstream reaction of the time: People’s fine art or porn?

Green had always thought that the book offered “truth too painful” for a large readership. Instead, “Binky Brown,” published in 1972, become a benchmark for cartoonists, pushing the limits of how much a comic could (or should) reveal about its creator. In the circular way influence and artistic creation often works, underground legend R. Crumb, whose work had influenced Green and “Binky Brown,” later wrote that “Binky” launched “many other cartoonists along the same path, myself included.”

Art Spiegelman, who has long noted that Green’s work paved a way to his Pulitzer-winning graphic novel “Maus,” said in a phone interview that he used to collaborate with Green, before “Binky Brown.” They bonded over having both taken “the same shoddy mail-order comics course as kids.” But Green, Spiegelman said, “had access to a brain that didn’t work the same as other people’s.” Cartoonists like Charles Schulz and Jack Kirby had long worked autobiographical details into comics, tucking them inside the adventures of Charlie Brown and Captain America. “But Justin was just showing his innermost shames, his embarrassments, desires, in a way cartoonists just didn’t back then. He was writing out loud the stuff you wouldn’t say in a small party of friends.”

Whether intended or not, his fingerprints on autobiographical comics would eventually be evident on Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” the memoirs of Aline Kominsky-Crumb, the dreaminess of Jim Woodring, the alt-weekly strips of Lynda Barry — and on and on.

Chris Ware, the celebrated Chicago-area cartoonist whose own autobiographical comics are as precise as Green’s looked frantic, said Green turned himself “inside out on the page so remorselessly the reader was forced into not only doing the same, but seeking some sympathetic psychic space with the seemingly self-taught, jumbled-yet-clear, I-had-to-draw-it moments he committed to paper. Sadly, relief was scant, especially for himself.” The couple of times they met, Green offered “encouragement and praise at an early moment when I least deserved it — but when it meant the most.”

Green became known for a personal warmth that seemed at odds with the angst he would spill across a page. “I think he helped people so much partly because it helped him to forget his own anxiety,” said daughter Julia Green. “He was always in turmoil.”

His OCD and raft of anxieties meant “he was never comfortable,” Tyler said. “He had, like, a script he would follow just to get daily tasks done. He was very kind and deferring to people. He learned to navigate spaces to manage his anxieties. He would always make a nice presentation of himself. But he would not comb his hair and his clothes — no joke, every single piece of clothing that Justin owned had paint or an ink stain on it.”

He grew up with servants and cooks, the son of a successful industrial realtor. He was a nervous kid. His father would send him into businesses in the Loop to collect back rent. On his first day of school in Highland Park, his mother dressed him a Brooks Brothers suit, and the teacher sent him home with a note: “Your son is hopelessly overdressed.”

Green lost himself in comics, favoring the art of comic-book ads and roughly-drawn funny-animal comics like “Peter Porkchops” over superhero books. He once wrote that after the local convenience store where he bought his comics was destroyed by fire, no museum could ever hope to offer “as much delight as that brilliantly colored comic rack.”

He attended the Rhode Island School of Design, then for a short time Syracuse University, but left for San Francisco and the lure of the 1960s, the hub of underground comix. He would become a staple of that small world, his work drawing on Dick Tracy, Crumb, E.C. horror comics and graphic design of advertising, finding its way into comics with names like Yellow Dog, Young Lust, Snarf, and back in Chicago, Bijou Funnies.

A decade later, he met Tyler in San Francisco. Being a fan, she sought him out. They were both Chicagoans, and a romance developed. He told the Tribune in a 2018 profile of Tyler that they realized they first ran into each other years earlier: “I was driving the 151 bus in Chicago in 1968 ... I picked up Carol and her brother and kicked everyone off the bus and drove them to Wrigley.” As Tyler said, “CTA drivers then were in the 50s and overweight and here was this adorable, young driver. Of course I remembered him.”

They got married, and for the past few decades lived in Cincinnati, Tyler’s studio occupying the top of their home, Green’s occupying the ground floor. There he continued what he had been doing in San Francisco — hand-painting signs for a living.

He got so good that he could craft a variety of fonts from memory, with nothing but a wet brush and a clean building facade. “Comix were always his identity,” Tyler said, “but it wasn’t like today. Then you might get a comic into a magazine or a book maybe, which then showed up in a headshop. But there was no money. So he became an exquisite sign painter.” He painted signs (and occasionally made a new comic) until he died.

Green is survived by Tyler, their daughter, Julia Green, and Catlin Wulferdingen, a daughter from an earlier marriage, as well as two sisters, Eve Green and Karin Moss.

His last request, his family said, was for the large career-spanning retrospective of his work that eluded him in life; indeed, last summer, during a vast MCA Chicago history of cartoonists in the city, neither Green nor Tyler were included. So his daughter Julia is now planning a Justin Green retrospective for fall, at her gallery in Cincinnati.

Green would often wave off the claims that he pioneered the most contemporary and prolific genre of adult comics. He would point out that he had been just as influenced himself by Philip Roth, James T. Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” But he was flattered by his place in the medium that dominated his childhood. In an afterword to McSweeney’s 2009 reissue of “Binky Brown,” he wrote:

“I am especially humbled and vindicated by the thought that my comic book was part of the soil from which Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ sprouted. For that alone, I’ll die happy.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com