non-literal in its visuals. Despite the heavy tone, humor is prominent. The work is conscious of its own creation—Green's drawing of it frames the narrative proper and there are constant reminders of it throughout. Green patterned the opening after those featuring the Crypt-Keeper in EC Comics' Tales from the Crypt series from the 1950s. Green used the adult Binky as the narrator of the captions and as a way to tie together the past and present timeframes. There is a disconnect in that the narrator refers to his younger self as "he". Other references to comics include a Sinstopper's Guidebook, which alludes to Dick Tracy's Crimestopper's Textbook and a cartoon by Robert Crumb in the background. Green employs numerous Catholic symbols, such as a word balloon adorned with symbols of Christ's martyrdom to represent the depth of Binky's desperation. Catholic works such as a catechism and Treasure Chest parochial comics appear throughout the work. Despite strict censorship in other media in the US, explicit sexuality was common in underground . Binky Brown was the first work of autobiographical comics to depict explicit sexuality: penises appear throughout, and Binky masturbates in one scene. The central symbol of the penis recurs sometimes subtly as in the images of pencils used to craft the work, and more often explicitly, as every phallic-like object Green sees becomes a literal "pecker ray"-projecting penis in Binky's mind. Art Spiegelman described the artwork as "quirky and ungainly". Though it appears awkward, Green put considerable effort into elements such as graphical perspective, and draws attention to his craft by depicting himself drawing and by placing the drawing manuals Perspective and Fun with a Pencil in the backgrounds. In contrast to the mundane tales of Harvey Pekar, another prominent early practitioner of autobiographical comics, Green makes wide use of visual metaphors. In Binky Brown symbols become literal, as when Binky imagines himself becoming a snowball hurtling into Hell or as a fish chased by a police officer who wears a crucifix. The work displays a wide array of visual techniques: diagrammatic arrows; mock-scholarly documentation; a great variety in panel size, composition, and layout; and a range of contrasting mechanical and organic rendering techniques, such as screentone alongside dense hand-drawn hatching. The symbolic and technical collide where the Virgin Mary becomes the vanishing point of Binky's converging "pecker rays". Critic Joseph Witek sees the shifting between different modes of traditional