Tijuana bible
Tijuana bibles were palm-sized erotic comics produced in the United States from the 1920s to the early 1960s. The earliest Tijuana bibles, particularly early “Tillie and Mac” and “Maggie and Jiggs” stories, are dated to 1925. Their popularity peaked during the Great Depression.
The term "Tijuana bibles" was introduced in Southern California in the late 1940s, reflecting the belief that the comics were manufactured and smuggled across the Mexico–United States border from Tijuana, Mexico.
Etymology
The term "Tijuana bibles" was first noted in Southern California in the late 1940s, and refers to the belief that they were manufactured and smuggled across the Mexico–United States border from Tijuana, Mexico.Format
The typical format of a Tijuana bible was a wallet-sized eight-panel comic printed in black ink on cheap white paper. The artists, writers, and publishers generally remained anonymous, as publication was both illegal and clandestine. Common themes included explicit sexual escapades involving well-known fictional or real-life personalities, used without regard for copyright or libel laws. Tijuana bibles often reflected the ethnic stereotypes prevalent in contemporary culture. For example, "You Nazi Man" ended with a publisher's plea for tolerance toward Jews in Germany.Characters
Most Tijuana bibles were pornographic parodies of popular newspaper comic strips of the era, such as "Blondie", "Barney Google", "Moon Mullins", "Popeye", "Tillie the Toiler", "The Katzenjammer Kids", "Dick Tracy", "Little Orphan Annie", Maggie and Jiggs from the popular newspaper strip Bringing Up Father. These were soon followed by Winnie Winkle, Dumb Dora, Dixie Dugan, Fritzi Ritz, Ella Cinders, and other familiar comic strip characters. Popeye and Blondie were among the most popular characters in the 1930s. “Blackjack” drew a series of ten comics using characters from Snow White, with each of the seven dwarfs starring in his own X-rated title.The first celebrity bibles were based on real-life newspaper tabloid sex scandals such as the 1926 Peaches Browning case. Ten years later, an entire series of bibles obscenely lampooned Wallis Simpson and the King of England. The most popular celebrity character at that time was Mae West. A series of ten bibles drawn by "Mr. Prolific" was based on famous gangsters, such as Legs Diamond, Al Capone, and Machine Gun Kelly. Another series of ten bibles drawn by Mr. Prolific featured radio stars, including Joe Penner and Kate Smith. The artist working under the alias "Elmer Zilch" drew a series of eight comics about famous boxers such as Jack Dempsey. Others featured caricatures of movie and sports stars like Mae West, W. C. Fields, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, the Marx Brothers, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe Louis, often with only slightly altered names.
In addition to comic strip characters and celebrities, many bibles featured nameless stock characters such as taxi drivers, firemen, traveling salesmen, farmer's daughters, icemen, and maids. Mr. Prolific's "Fuller Brush Man" was one of the few original recurring characters created expressly for the bibles.
Artists
Little is known about the anonymous artists who produced the Tijuana bibles. Wesley Morse drew many of those appearing shortly before World War II, most notably about a dozen titles inspired by the 1939 New York World's Fair. Freelance cartoonist Doc Rankin is alleged to be the creator of hundreds of Tijuana bibles in the 1930s, although this remains unproven. Gershon Legman, who was involved in the erotic book trade in New York City in the 1930s, claimed that Rankin was paid $35 weekly to produce two eight pagers. Rankin then delivered the work to Louis Shomer. During World War II, with the production of new Tijuana bible titles shut down, Shomer employed Wesley Morse to produce hundreds of unsigned and uncredited cartoons, illustrations, cover art and advertisements for his line of joke books, Larch Publications.In addition to his identification of Rankin, Legman also claimed to know that one of the major Tijuana bible artists was a woman. A declassified FBI memorandum from the early 1940s confirms that they knew one of the main artists to be a woman, but the artist's name has been redacted from the document. It is likely that the artist referred to was Blackjack, who has never been positively identified but may possibly have been Legman's acquaintance, Clara Tice. Blackjack drew upon movie star fan magazines, both for story ideas and for visual reference, for titles like William Powell and Myrna Loy in "Nuts to Will Hays!", and followed the storylines of the daily newspaper comics closely and satirized them: the plot and characters of Annie and Rose in "Doughnut Girls Fill Up the Holes!" fits right in to the 1938 story arc in which Little Orphan Annie and her grownup friend Rose Chance tried to beat the Great Depression by starting a doughnut-making business. Blackjack's two baseball-themed bibles, featuring New York Yankees Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig and Lefty Gomez, show a good awareness of the latest tabloid gossip about the Yankees' love lives as of spring training 1937, although the pairing of Lou Gehrig with Mae West seems to be purely a figment of Blackjack's imagination.
Collectors have assigned names to several anonymous artists with recognizable styles: "Mr. Prolific" was the creator of the "Adventures of a Fuller Brush Man" series, and the master of a sure-handed, elegant steel-pen inking style. "Mr. Dyslexic" was a seemingly clumsy, semi-literate artist who produced numerous titles in the postwar period, some with political content. "Blackjack" was an artist active around 1938 whose work frequently depicted imaginary pairings of famous Hollywood movie stars, the artwork featuring large solid black areas and sometimes resembling linoleum block prints. The name "Elmer Zilch" appears on a number of bibles that appeared circa 1934. Zilch was an early and witty creator of the mid-1930s, rivaling Mr. Prolific in talent, popularity, and productivity.
Commentators have claimed to discern the styles of many artists who produced bibles during their heyday, with the most productive artists each drawing from 150 to 200 titles, followed by the output of Wesley Morse, Blackjack, and Mr. Dyslexic, who each produced about half that many. These five artists may have drawn half of all the Tijuana bibles ever produced. There were also two anonymous artists in the 1950s who each drew about 60 to 80 works, sold for a dime each to a clientele which allegedly consisted largely of high school boys. These late-period bible series included such titles as "Bellhop Kicks Dog" and a number of "Archie"-themed comics.
A few observers believe that Mr. Prolific and Elmer Zilch may even have been the same artist working in two styles to vary his output and extend his shelf life. The byline "Elmer Zilch" appears on a number of Tijuana bibles which evidently came on the market in 1934 and 1935, and the same artist's unmistakable "big-foot" cartoony style can be seen in many more. The name "Elmer Zilch" referred to a fictional character who was the mascot of the humor magazine Ballyhoo.
The total number of distinct stories produced has been estimated by Art Spiegelman to be between 700 and 1,000.
Production
The ten-book series format was dictated by the limitations of the printing equipment used to print the bibles, which made it convenient to print a set of ten titles at a time, side by side on a large sheet which was then cut into strips, collated, folded, and stapled. Typically, a new set of ten would be issued every couple of months, all drawn by the same artist, featuring ten cartoon characters or celebrities. For several months in 1935, Elmer Zilch and his publishers experimented with a ten-page format, issued with two-tone covers in four sets of eight, plus one set of ten in the eight-page format. Each panel in this series was surrounded by an intricate engraved arabesque border, possibly intended as an anti-counterfeiting device as it was hard to reproduce, and the series became known to collectors as the "Ornate Borders" series. Only 42 bibles are known by collectors to have been issued in this style, and most of them were soon being reprinted in truncated eight-page versions. Often the added two pages were simply filler gag panels drawn by Zilch.In addition to the eight-pagers, there were also the more expensive "16-pagers", printed in a larger page size with more pages, and usually more carefully drawn and better printed. These were high-priced and less common than the eight-pagers but showcased the artists' best work.
In the 1930s, many early bibles bore phony imprints of non-existent companies such as "London Press", "La France Publishing", and "Tobasco Publishing Co." in London, Paris, and Havana. The popular line using the "Tobasco" imprint was around the underground market for a couple of years and also printed a number of pamphlet-sized erotic fiction readers, in addition to about 60 Tijuana bible titles, most of them original.
Millions of Tijuana bibles were printed and sold in the 1930s, the heyday of the bibles. But the number of new Tijuana bible titles being produced took a nosedive at the beginning of World War II, and the industry never recovered. Factors in the decline of the Tijuana bibles at this time may have included police raids and the retirement of Doc Rankin, who was called up by the military at the beginning of the war, along with wartime shortages of paper and printing supplies. Printing plates of older bibles were worn down through continued reprintings until they were nearly blank, and original plates lost in police raids had to be replaced with new plates crudely recut by hamfisted, untrained amateur engravers. The quality of Tijuana bibles available on the market suffered, and prices dropped as sales plummeted.
Comics artist and historian Art Spiegelman notes that records do not seem to exist of prosecutions against publishers and artists for making Tijuana bibles; the cartoonist added, however, that authorities occasionally seized shipments and people selling Tijuana bibles. According to Spiegelman, it is not clear whether mom and pop outfits or organized crime created the small salacious booklets. Old newspaper crime stories seem to indicate that most bibles were the product of a fairly small group of independent small businessmen with their own printing presses, invariably springing up again in a new location after a police raid shut them down. These businessmen manufactured a variety of pornographic products, including pornographic playing cards, gag greeting cards, and film reels, and created their own underground distribution routes around the United States.
When the business was revived after the war, the quality of new bibles was dismal: they were poorly drawn, badly printed, and the stories were amateurish and puerile compared to the work of a decade before. Mr. Dyslexic, the leading artist of the postwar era, was possessed of an almost staggering lack of drawing talent matched only by his bad taste and ignorance of the English language. His best-known work "Traveling Preacher" is a lengthy, labored-over retelling of a novel by Erskine Caldwell, whom Mr. Dyslexic then proceeded to acknowledge by making Caldwell himself the star of another scabrous Tijuana bible.
A few attempts at serialization were also made, most notably in the "Fuller Brush Man" stories. During the Senate racket investigations of the 1950s, a New York businessman named Abe Rubin was asked if there was any truth to the rumor picked up by a Chicago police lieutenant that he had once been the original printer and distributor of the series. The Fuller Brush Man stories made a very weak stab at continuity, but each eight-panel story was self-contained. The only real serial stories told in the eight-pager format were three tales by Blackjack, featuring original characters named Fifi, Maizie, and Tessie, in "To be continued" narratives which stretched through three or four installments before concluding.