NEW YORK, NY.- Justin Green, a star of underground comics in the 1970s who channeled his Catholic guilt and childhood neuroses into “Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary,” a raw and intimate confessional epic that inspired cartoonists such as Art Spiegelman to explore autobiographical subjects, died April 23 in Cincinnati. He was 76.

His wife, Carol Tyler, a comics artist known for her own autobiographical stories, said the cause was colon cancer.

Green arrived in San Francisco around 1970 as the underground comics world was starting to thrive. He was soon contributing to publications such as Young Lust, Insect Fear, Bijou Funnies, and Tales of Sex and Death.

Within a few years, he was at work on “Binky Brown.” He hung its pages along a clothesline that encircled his drawing table and snaked through his cottage in the Mission District to track the unfolding of Binky’s life story, which was based on his own.

“He was coming from another planet,” Spiegelman said in a phone interview. “He was reporting from something no one was seeing. Out of a group of idiosyncratic people, he was the most idiosyncratic. He was so interior that he made comics grow up.”

The first page of 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.

Well after “Binky Brown” was published by the San Francisco company Last Gasp, Green realized that the symptoms his alter ego displayed added up to obsessive-compulsive behavior.

“Green is unflinchingly analytical in exploring every formative event and thought, from his playmates’ revelations about the facts of life, and consequent questions of his parents; to his prurient dreams of girls at school and his accidental discovery of his physiological response,” Graham Johnstone wrote in a review of “Justin Green’s Binky Brown Sampler” (1995) — a collection of the original comic book and several shorter, later Binky Brown strips — on Slings & Arrows, an online graphic novel guide.

Spiegelman said his graphic novel “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale” (1986) — a Holocaust memoir about his family, in which the Jewish characters are mice and the Nazis are cats — would not have been possible without Green’s autobiographical example. “Maus” and its sequel, “Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale” (1991), received a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 1992.

“His influence allowed me to go back to childhood memories,” Spiegelman said. He added that a number of other artists have followed Green’s path, including Aline Kominsky-Crumb, whose husband, Robert, is a titan of underground comics, and Chris Ware.

Green’s “mind-expanding example of self-dissection helped me gather the confidence to write ‘Jimmy Corrigan,’” Ware said in an email, “which is fiction, but has its autobiographical grounding as a story about an adult meeting an estranged parent, which I was at the time trying to find the courage to do in my personal life.”

Justin Considine Green was born July 27, 1945, in Boston and raised in Chicago. His father, John, worked in real estate, and his mother, Julia (Gleason) Green, known as Claire, was a homemaker. Like Binky’s parents, Justin’s father was Jewish and his mother was Roman Catholic.




In one cartoon, “Great Moments in Alcoholism,” Green depicted his father in an incident from real life: After a few shots of Jim Beam, he approached a table in a Las Vegas nightclub in 1967 where Frank Sinatra and his party were making noise while his friend Clancy Hayes, a Dixieland banjo player and singer, was performing. “So Pop marched over and personally told Sinatra & Co. to ‘SHUT UP’!”

Green attended the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied painting, but he did not graduate. He felt a calling to join the underground comics movement in San Francisco, lured by the texture of Crumb’s comics, “packed with harsh drawing stuffed into crookedly drawn panels,” he was quoted as saying in Patrick Rosenkranz in “Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975” (2008).

But by the mid-1970s, with a daughter to support, Green had turned to sign painting as his primary occupation, although he continued to contribute to comic anthologies such as Weirdo, Raw and Arcade.

“He started doing signs to make hot cash,” Tyler said in an interview.

Green and Tyler are the subject of “Married to Comics,” an upcoming documentary by John Kinhart, who also directed “Pigheaded” (2016), a film about underground cartoonist Skip Williamson.

Green painted signs that advertised prices at a fish market and displayed the names of law firms in gold leaf. For a barber shop in San Francisco, he painted figures that looked like the cartoon character Little Lulu and a juvenile delinquent with a ducktail haircut. He continued his sign painting when he moved, first to Sacramento, California, and then to Cincinnati.

He kept using lead-based paint long after it was banned; he told his wife that his gravestone should read, “He died for greater opacity.” As he lay dying, Tyler said, their daughter Julia Green raised a jar to his nose. He sniffed it and quietly said his last words: “Lead paint.”

In 1986, he began drawing a strip, “Justin Green’s Sign Game,” for a monthly industry magazine, Signs of the Times. For 20 years, he used it to dispense tips and tricks of the trade and to look at its past, in strips such as “A Brief History of the Barber Pole” and “Duke Ellington Quits His Day Job" (the jazz great had a sign-painting business before taking on music full time).

And in 1992, he began another strip, “Musical Legends,” for the Tower Records chain’s Pulse! magazine. His subjects — some of them rendered in a straightforward tone, others whimsically or surreally — included the day that Nat King Cole was attacked at a concert; composer Philip Glass’ time as a taxicab driver; and, as he put it, the “Philanthropy of the Thin Elvis.” The strips were later collected in a book.

In addition to his wife and his daughter, Green, who died in a hospice facility, is survived by another daughter, Catlin Wulferdingen, from his marriage to Maureen Raedy, which ended in divorce; two grandchildren; and his sisters, Karin Moss and Eve Green. His marriage to Nina Paul also ended in divorce. His brother, Keith, a distributor and publisher of underground comics, died in 1996.

Green was ambivalent about the legacy of “Binky Brown,” which sold about 70,000 copies but which he once called a “sin of youth.” Ron Turner of Last Gasp recalled in a phone interview the difficulty that Green had before he started working on it.

“He said, ‘I wanted to do this comic book but I have to work through these demons I have and I don’t know if I can,” said Turner, who had supported Green with a monthly stipend and occasional bags of groceries as he wrote and illustrated “Binky Brown.”

But more than 30 years later, in 2005, a crate arrived in Turner’s office that contained a small coffin. On its lid, Green had painted the words “Last Will and Testament of Binky Brown,” an early sign of his unfulfilled ambition to write a final comic book that would shed him of his creation.

“Justin wanted to kill off Binky Brown,” Turner said, “kind of like how Robert Crumb got rid of Fritz the Cat” — probably his best-known character — “by killing him with an ice pick.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.