So Demanding of Purity?: ReReading Binky Brown

In articles and books published over the last three decades, R.C. Harvey has argued that the essence of the comics medium lies in the interdependent juxtaposition of words and pictures. As Harvey writes in The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History, "One litmus test of good comics art is to ascertain to what extent the sense of the words depends on the pictures and vice versa [...] when words and pictures blend in mutual dependence to tell a story and thereby convey a meaning that neither the verbal nor the visual can achieve without the other, then the storyteller is using to the fullest the resources the medium offers him" (4).

Like lots of folks, I have problems with Harvey's juxtaposition theory. Harvey's tastes, for instance, are radically different from mine. In Comic Book, he cites a Bud Blake Tiger strip as an example of an outstanding combination of words and pictures, while comics I consider more valuable--like "American Splendor Assaults the Media," with its massive word balloon hovering over Robert Crumb's portrait of a feverish Harvey Pekar--would probably be too talky and not blendy enough for R.C.

I think that comics--like other texts--are multi-voiced and multi-faceted, and refuse to be reduced to an aesthetic prescription like word-picture interdependence.

One model that can help us appreciate how complex comics can be is Seymour Chatman's argument about text types. In his book Coming to Terms: the Rhetoric of Narration in Fiction and Film (1991), Chatman categorizes texts into at least three different modes--narrative, description and argument--and defines each. Narrative is the only text type which operates according to a "principle of causality (event a causes event b, b causes c, and so on)" within a progressive sequence of time. Description is defined as the rendering of "the properties of things--typically, though not necessarily, objects visible to or imaginable by the senses." A descriptive text replaces narrative sequentiality with an organization based on connections between details and/or ideas. Chatman's final text type is argument, designed to "persuade an audience of the validity of some proposition, usually proceeding along deductive or inductive lines."

At first it might seem that classifying all the texts in the world into three types is even more reductive than Harvey's verbal-visual theory. But Chatman argues that text types can interpenetrate and operate in each other's service. A Victorian novel begins with an extended description of a manor house; a story by Nadine Gordimer can function as an implicit argument against Apartheid; a photograph that documents a family reunion can imply a narrative by capturing a nephew staring lustfully at his aunt. The cross-pollinations among narrative, description and argument that occur in even so-called simple texts (like children's books) are complex and unique.

Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972), maybe my single favorite comic book ever, is a perfect example of a mixture of Chatman's text types. For those of you who haven't read Binky--what are you waiting for?--it's a semi-autobiographical underground comic that reveals in painful detail how Green's psychosexual identity was twisted by the doctrines of the Catholic Church during his childhood and adolescence. (Green has also identified Binky as an account of his struggles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.) Because he can't assume that all his readers are (ex-)Catholics, Green constantly interrupts his personal narrative to describe Church rituals and beliefs. On page 9, Binky's condemnation of an ex-nun is followed by a discourse on Hell titled, Ripley-style, "Believe It or Burn":

And at the end of page 17, Binky calls some bullies "Goddamn shits," which leads him to realize, on the next page, that he's violated the Second Commandment. Green transitions from this incident into a lecture on the various mechanisms the Church makes available (penance, indulgences) for believers to erase their sins from The Heavenly Permanent Record:

These descriptive passages are among the most word-heavy passages in Binky; the intricacies of Catholic theology need a lot of words to do them (in)justice. Further, these sequences feature some complex (if not exactly Harveyian) interactions between words and pictures. In the aside on penance, the explanatory captions at the top of the panels are serious and straightforward, while the drawings and dialogue ("Doof!") capture the absurdity of the Church's stances on "temporal punishments" and indulgences. Green is simultaneously a serious explicator of Church doctrine and a sarcastic smart-ass, a balancing act he's able to pull off throughout much of Binky.

There's both storytelling and description in Binky, but I also think it mounts an implicit argument too, one connected to the change in tone that occurs about halfway through the comic. In the beginning, the character Binky is exposed to both sex and Catholicism, and Green's tone is relatively silly and light. One of Green's central tactics here is the juxtaposition between high Church doctrine and earthy stuff like horniness and toilets. When his mom confirms his suspicions about the Facts of Life, Binky combines his new (and very limited) knowledge about sex with his religious beliefs and comes up with dreams of couples "doing it" in "the unique cruciform position." The hairs peeking out of a nun's wimple provide him with an illicit sexual thrill. A "slight digression" about the cleanliness of the soul is followed by Binky's brother yelling "Hey, Bink! I just dipped your toothbrush in the toilet!"

The tone of Binky, however, grows much darker later in the book. The turning point is page 21, when some bullies throw Binky into the girls' locker room:

These adolescent hijinx are somewhat undercut by the next tier of panels, as Binky becomes a "lone wolf" lingering on the side of a hill, dreaming of apocalypse. And the tone darkens further with the final two panels of the page. Panel five is a massive block of text without pictures (the absolute antithesis of Harvey's visual-verbal blend) that describes the reported appearances of the Virgin Mary at Fatima and Lourdes. The final panel shows Binky tossing darts at a poster of Marilyn Monroe, while chortling "Ha ha, nuthin' holy about her." In the space of a single page, we've gone from a Porky's-style prank to ruminations about the atom bomb to a savage Madonna/whore dichotomy that prefigures the Manichean white/black, clean/dirty, saved/damned worldview that rules Binky in his later adolescence.

Binky judges himself harshly. He is either sexual and damned, or repressed and holy, and his attempts to repress his "negative" urges fail. He tries to break the patterns of his obsessive-compulsive habits by having a harmless daydream about attractive beachcombers, but this quickly mutates into "homo thoughts about Christ." While at the Communion rail in church, he has a slight tremor in his crotch, and suddenly there's a little Devil exhorting him to "Fuck Mary! Fuck Mary!" He develops mantras like "noyatin," designed to purge his mind of dirty ideas, but they don't work. Then, on page 34, Bink has what he considers his most blasphemous moment--he imagines Mary having a period--and he runs out of church in horror, declaring that he's "no longer a Catholic." Goofy conflations of religion and sex, like the cruciform position and the sexy hairs on a nun's forehead, have been replaced by the overwhelming shame he feels in visualizing the Virgin Mary's menstrual flow. The playful first section of Binky ends with our hero on a hill, thinking about theology and the bomb; the nastier second section ends with Bink squatting on the Illuminati pyramid--in the Judge's seat--damning his own eternal soul.

The contrast between the first and second sections creates a cause-effect structure. In part one, Binky is a highly unusual child immersed in both sexual desire and Catholic dogma. Part two answers the question "So what happens to a kid in a situation like that?" by showing us an older, increasingly neurotic Binky struggling with the demons from his childhood. This process--the boy is exposed to ideas that torment him later as a man--plays out in many small details that link the two sections of Binky. On page 8, for instance, a nun imposes "uniformity, rigidity, and obedience" by instructing her students to line up their desks in right angles with the floor tiles; on page 32, Binky shuts down his blasphemous sexual energy by aligning a chair against a wall:

But right angles don't offer permanent relief, so Binky learns at an early age to look for solace elsewhere. We see him as a child stave off night terrors by crashing his cranium against his bed's headboard, making himself so dizzy he has hallucinations. In adulthood, Binky avoids the terrors imbedded in him by the Church by indulging in the grown-up equivalents of the "headboard slam": beer, speed, acid, masochism, psychiatry, anything that helps him run away from himself.

Binky ends with a six-page third section where Binky is "miraculously" cured of his obsessions, and here Binky revisits and rewrites his past to make his future possible. On the very first page of Binky, our hero plays stickball in the house and accidentally breaks a statue of the Madonna; in the final scene of Binky, the tormented, grown-up version of our hero consciously smashes Virgin Mary figurines in an attempt to "blow up the main power plant" of his neuroses. The panel that opens this final scene features Binky, with pecker-rays flowing from his hands, feet and crotch, arguing with Mary about "that mean ol' nasty, whining Catholic God":

"So demanding of 'purity'?" For me, the word "purity" here goes beyond Mary's virginal status. Harvey's insistence that the comics medium be defined as verbal-visual interdependence seems like a kind of idealized purity itself, one that doesn't reflect the different ways comics can mix words and pictures to tell stories, offer descriptions, or mount arguments. Binky is Binky's (and Green's) story, but it's also an exegesis of the Catholic Church, and an argument that letting go of Catholic doctrines would be an evolutionary leap for mankind akin to the "desperate leaps" taken by the first fish that came on land. It's a great comic precisely because it will not be restricted by arbitrary rules, Catholic or aesthetic or otherwise: it's a chronicle of freedom.

NOTE: Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is now available as part of the trade paperback Justin Green's Binky Brown Sampler, published by Last Gasp (1995).

Comments

[CharlesWHatfield]

Craig, great to see you writing about Binky Brown. You know I love that book; I wrote about it TCJ's "Top 100" and again in ALTERNATIVE COMICS (plug, plug). It's my favorite underground comix book, and, IMO, the best piece of sustained narrative from the underground period. Also a seminal work whose influence keeps spreading. Whenever I see memoirs of disease or disability in comics, and of course there are many, I see Binky's shadow.

One thing comes to mind when reading your analyses of particular moments in the book: Binky Brown really deserves to be reprinted in a larger format. I think this is true of just about all of Green's work: it's hyper-dense, with a kind of neurotic horror vacui going on on most pages, and constant deliberate shifts in rendering style, texture, etc. I mean, just think back to "Sweet Void of Youth," for example. Dense!

Most of the Green books I've seen looked cramped to me, and I think they would breathe more easily if they were a bit larger. One of Green's UG comix, Sacred and Profane, is printed oversized, and the work really benefits from the treatment. I'd say Binky Brown really deserves this kind of spacious presentation.

Let no one be fooled into thinking that Binky Brown is a mere confessional comic to be valued for the bravery of its content but not for the elegance of its execution. The book is a stunning display of cartooning, in which constant changes in the layouts and drawing are crucial to its narrative, its descriptive powers, and its argument. Green riffs on everything from Durer to Gould, and the results are beautiful.