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Adult comics

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Adult comics

The catch-all term adult comics typically denotes comic books, comic magazines, comic strips or graphic novels that are marketed either mainly or strictly towards adult (or mature) readers. This can be because they contain material that could be considered thematically inappropriate for children, including vulgarity, morally questionable actions, disturbing imagery, and sexually explicit material.

Adult comics can be defined as intended for audience of 16 years or older.

Roger Sabin traces the history of adult comics back to the political cartoons published in broadsheets since the 19th century. In the 1930s, there were clandestinely produced tijuana bibles – rectangular, eight page pamphlets with black printing on cheap white paper. The artwork ranged from excellent to utterly crude and the stories were explicit sexual escapades, usually featuring well known cartoon characters, political figures, or movie stars, without the subjects' consent.[citation needed]

Sold under the counter in places such as tobacco stores and burlesque houses, millions of Tijuana Bibles were sold at the height of their popularity in the 1930s. They went into a steep decline after World War II and by the mid-1950s only a small trickle of new product was still appearing on the market, mainly in the form of cheaply printed, poorly drawn and tasteless little eight pagers which sold for 10 cents each in run-down candy stores and gas stations, circulating mainly among delinquent teenagers.[citation needed]

Starting in 1932, Norman Pett drew a strip called Jane for the British Daily Mirror newspaper. The heroine would often find herself in awkward situations where she would lose her clothing for one reason or another. The strip was written to some extent for a military audience to boost the morale of troops away from home. Winston Churchill said that Jane was Britain's "secret weapon".

In the United States, pulp magazines such as Harry Donenfeld's Spicy Detective featured comics on heroines who lose their clothing, such as Adolphe Barreaux's Sally the Sleuth which debuted in 1934. Many of the early comic publishers got their start in the pulps with Donenfeld for instance going on to found DC Comics. Fiction House similarly started as a pulp magazine publisher, but in 1938, they released Jumbo Comics featuring Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, the first of many scantily clad jungle girls. Fiction House comics routinely featured attractive women on the covers, a trend which later became referred to as 'good girl art'. In 1941, Quality Comics put out Police Comics featuring Phantom Lady, a scantily clad crime fighter. Fox Feature Syndicate eventually began publishing Phantom Lady where she was drawn by Matt Baker. Milton Caniff started producing the comic strip Male Call in 1943, and Bill Ward came out with Torchy in 1944 featuring sexy heroines.[citation needed]

Pulp magazines were also known for their violence. The Shadow carried two guns for killing criminals, and Batman also wielded a gun from 1939 through 1944 before giving it up. Crime and horror comics were popular genres in the late 1940s and early 1950s with such titles as Lev Gleason Publications' Crime Does Not Pay, EC Comics' Crime SuspenStories, Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror all enjoying brief spells of interest. It is believed that EC had one of the best-selling lines at the time. Harvey Kurtzman was one of the key writers for EC, and artists such as Wally Wood or Al Williamson began to do research for each new story far beyond what had been seen in titles published up to that time.[citation needed]

In the 1950s Irving Klaw published a line of underground fetish and bondage comics by artists like Eric Stanton, John Willie, and Gene Bilbrew. These never achieved widespread popularity but were kept in print for many years, sold through Klaw's mail order catalog to the same customers who bought his bondage photographs of Bettie Page. Not quite obscene enough to warrant prosecution, they skirted the limits of legality by avoiding full frontal nudity in their depictions.[citation needed]

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