Education
Green attended the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1969.
Green attended the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1969.
Green"s short comics pieces appeared in various titles and anthologies including Art Spiegelman"s and Bill Griffith"s anthologies Arcade and Young Lust. But in 1972, he was overwhelmed by an urgent desire to tell the story of his personal anxieties. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is a solo comic book that details Green"s struggle with a form of OCD known as scrupulosity, within the framework of growing up Catholic in 1950s Chicago.
Intense graphic depiction of personal torment had never appeared in comic book form before, and it had a profound effect on other cartoonists and the future direction of comics as literature.
Green"s roommate at the time, Art Spiegelman, was so inspired by Binky Brown that he thought he"d try his own story, Maus. Green is also a master sign painter, which he described during the 1980s in his monthly comic strip for the trade publication Signs of the Times, that later became a book entitled Justin Green"s Sign Game (Last Gasp).
In the 1990s, Green focused his cartooning attention on a series of visual biographies for Pulse!, the in-house magazine for Tower Records. lieutenant ran for ten years, later collected into an anthology known as Musical Legends.
Green still makes comics the way he did when he started, by dipping a pen nib into an ink bottle.