New Film about Cincinnati Creators of Autobiographical Comics Gets Screening Here

This story is featured in CityBeat's May 1 print edition.

Ever since it had a premiere screening in Silver Spring, Maryland, last year, people in Cincinnati have been eagerly awaiting a chance to see John Kinhart’s new, long-in-the-works documentary Married to Comics .

It’s an intimate, perceptive and artfully deep look into the lives of two married Cincinnati creators of autobiographical comics/graphic novels — Justin Green and Carol Tyler. Green’s 1972 Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is considered the first major autobiographical work of the genre.

Now, Married to Comics will have a screening at Clifton’s Esquire Theatre on May 16 at 7 p.m. It’s part of the film’s careful roll-out at film festivals and select cities.

The two artists moved to the Cincinnati area from California in the late 1990s, and both became celebrated locally. Green found a new, devoted following here for his music-history-related artworks championed by Shake It Records, while Tyler has won praise for her graphic memoir and other art, especially 2015’s Soldier’s Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father .

Green died in 2022 of cancer at age 76, while Tyler — now 72 — continues to live here and create. Their daughter Julia, also featured in the movie, operates the Northside art gallery (DSGN)CLLCTV.

For Kinhart, 44, who lives in Maryland, finishing this film is the culmination of years of work. Besides being a documentarian, he makes art, and in the mid to late 2000s, he began experimenting with drawing autobiographical comics/cartoons. As he grew to like it and developed a delicate line, he started thinking of doing a documentary about, quite naturally, autobiographical comics and their origin.

At around the same time, he had met some people familiar with the Underground Comix movement — which had roots in the counterculture — while making a 2007 doc about Baltimore cult-film creator Don Dohler, Blood, Boobs & Beast . And they told him about a relatively unknown giant of the movement, Justin Green, and his Binky Brown autobiographical comic . In it, Green told and imaginatively depicted how he suffered from, according to Kinhart, a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that medical studies call “scrupulosity.” It is anxiety caused by religious issues — he had attended a parochial school as a child. The comic is now considered a landmark in the emergence of a major new artform — the cartoonist Art Spiegelman has said that without Binky there would be no Maus , for which he won a Pulitzer in 1992.

“As I was reading about him, it said he’s married to Carol,” Kinhart says in an interview. “So I clicked on her, then bought and read her books. I had Bink y fresh in my head and I’m reading her Soldier’s Heart and I’m seeing she’s revealing some really vulnerable moments of turmoil in their marriage. That’s a critical element to telling a great story in film — having a subject who is willing to share her vulnerabilities.

“I realized this subject had potential to transcend beyond the normal documentary about an artist,” he continues. “I like those kinds of documentaries, but I wanted to go deeper, which is what autobiographical comics do. The more personal they get, the more you feel like you’ve made a connection with the author. So that’s what I was aiming to achieve with this documentary.”

There was indeed turmoil in their marriage, although also deep love. Tyler had moved to Cincinnati without Green, who had become involved with another woman. When he did arrive here, they often spent time apart. That leads to a particularly beautiful element of the film — the use of Tyler’s video footage of a weather vane outside her apartment window, filmed as the seasons change around it. It becomes symbolic in the film.

Green at first was quite reticent to take part in Kinhart’s film. But he did eventually agree, and he speaks in a resonant voice that conveys wisdom and a searching effort to understand the world and people around him, as well as his own art. This becomes one of the film’s most wrenching aspects, as later Green starts to succumb to the conspiratorial fantasies he finds on social media, especially regarding the roots of 9/11. He tries to talk about it in the film, still using that gentle voice.

To give an idea of how much Green was held in regard by the giants of contemporary comics and cartooning, one need only look at those who are interviewed in Married to Comics — they include Spiegelman, Chris Ware and Robert Crumb. In fact, Crumb was the last footage that Kinhart shot. In May 2023, Crumb came to Cincinnati from France as part of an American trip following the 2022 death from cancer of his wife, the noted comics artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb.

“I had a window of a couple days in May when we thought it was going to happen,” Kinhart recalls. “So I went out there and he was visiting for a couple days and we were able to shoot some footage. Carol had been suffering this terrible grief for a long time, so I think this presence of an old friend going through the same thing was healing for her.”

In the end, Kinhart found Tyler inspirational. “I think she is this critical engine to the story of the movie,” he says. Just like her friend says in the film, at the end her comics always have a sense of hope. That was one of the things I think really brings a connection to the audience.

“And a lot of people who watch the movie talk about how much they’re affected by her experience, her challenges, working hard and creating opportunities for herself, and having her day in the sun.”

And Tyler has equal respect for Kinhart’s work: “John is such a terrific film artist, capturing the highs and lows of our relationship,” she says via email. “It’s an honor to have been a part of his project. Although it’s hard for me to be objective. I recognize our lives as shown in the film, which bursts out at first with a jolt of excitement. Then it slowly begins to mull things over, drawing us deeper into the story, by delicately examining the convoluted details of our dynamic.

“Eventually, it becomes a tissue box affair, leading to a greater understanding of how intense, impossible, and yet exceptional this life between me and Justin truly was. Every time I see the movie, I love and miss him even more, almost unbearably.

“Which brings me to, ‘What would Justin have thought of this?’ Completely embarrassed, yet absolutely humbled and proud of John’s poetic interpretation.”

Married to Comics will be screened at Esquire Theatre on May 16 at 7 p.m. Info: esquiretheatre.com .