BINKY BROWN MEETS THE HOLY VIRGIN MARY 57
with guilt over his own sexual desires. Th e fear and guilt lead Binky to concoct his
own interpretation of religious teaching and sexual behavior. He builds his own set
of rules around the intersection of these ideas, and enforces these rules on himself
rigidly. However, it proves an ineff ective coping mechanism. Th e rules prove unyield-
ing, to the point of driving the adolescent Binky to concoct his own punishments for
violating them.
Binky sees his thoughts and sexual desires as adversaries. He believes his body is
betraying him by leading him into thoughts of sexual sin. His obsessions with the bod-
ies of his female classmates, coupled with the harsh disciplinarian rule of the Catholic
school he attends, create a causal detach in his thoughts. He internalizes all the dictates
of the nuns and priests. Th ese dictates, often reinforced through corporal punishment,
create a mindset of unquestioning devotion to Church doctrine. Th is mindset is borne
more out of fear of punishment, especially everlasting punishment, than it is out of a
desire to behave morally for the sake of doing so.
As his fantasies grow more intense, Binky sees his body as his enemy. He sublimates
his desires into fantasies, including bondage fantasies, in which exterior forces control
his body. Th ese fantasies evolve into a perception of visible manifestations of sexual
arousal. Binky begins to see rays shooting out of his crotch any time he feels even slightly
aroused. He evolves a language to combat these rays. Th e constructed term “noyatin”
is Binky’s contraction of “not to sin” and it becomes his mantra for repentance. Th ese
sensations prove intolerable when his fantasies begin to focus on the Holy Virgin Mary.
Binky begins to see his body as completely beyond his control. He imagines that his
appendages are all phalluses, and that only he can see the reality of the situation. Into
adulthood, his search for salvation from this self-imposed trap leads him to try to escape
into a wide assortment of beliefs and passions as means of solace and escape. Th e work
of many comic creators, notably Jon J. Muth’s Moonshadow and, in superhero terms, Jim
Starlin’s Warlock , later trod this path of self-searching symbolism in their work.
As is inevitable, the issue is only resolved when Binky is able to confront his fears and
guilt. Th is confrontation takes the form of a nearly naked Binky seated in the center of
a circle of cheap plaster Madonna fi gurines. Binky addresses the religious iconography
of Mary, his phallic fi ngers and toes still emitting sexual rays. After coming to intel-
lectual and emotional terms with Catholic guilt and the paradox of the virgin birth,
Binky shatters his guilt around these issues. He does this by physically destroying the
plaster Madonnas. One fi gurine survives his cathartic destructive rampage. He saves
this fi gurine in the hope of building new associations around it, and by extension, hopes
of reinventing himself.
In 1990, Green was confronted by a Catholic priest about the potential harm
Binky Brown might have done to children reading it. While the priest accepted Green’s
observations about the “adults only” disclaimer on the book and his argument about the
aesthetic potential of the comic form, he still contended that comics remain largely the
province of children and that, in light of that, the potential for harm remained ominous.
Green countered by citing the harm done to children by repressive Church doctrine
