Duke Ellington & A Brief History Of The Barber Pole

In 1972 Justin Green released a comic-book drawing upon his childhood traumas and experiences involving his Catholic upbringing and a condition he would later recognise as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Already a highly regarded underground cartoonist, “Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary” would earn Green considerable acclaim as a pioneer of the autobiographical comic-book genre, proving influential to such names as Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman (whose Pulitzer-Prize winning “Maus”, is said to have been inspired greatly by Green’s seminal book).

Throughout the eighties, to supplement income and support his family, Green worked as a sign painter in Cincinnati and would later mine these experiences for “Justin Green’s Sign Game”, a periodical comic-strip published in a U.S. sign magazine that depicted, with humour and honesty, life in the sign business from the mundane to the unexpected, the trivial to the historical.

I appreciate that this doesn’t sound like prime comic-strip source material but here are two examples for your consideration:

There are more examples of Justin’s work here: Justin Green

He is also featured in the “Sign Painters” book by Faithe Levine and Sam Macon, which was featured a couple of posts back.

And I found a link to an interview which, although doesn’t feature much on his sign work, does share his thoughts on art, O.C.D., surrealism etc. Well worth a look. Here.