Tijuana bible

Tijuana bibles (also known as eight-pagers, Tillie-and-Mac books, Jiggs-and-Maggie books, Jo-Jo books, bluesies, blue-bibles, gray-backs, and two-by-fours) 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 (1929 to 1939).

The term "Tijuana bibles" was first noted in Southern California in the late 1940s, and refers to the (incorrect) belief that they were manufactured and smuggled across the border from Tijuana, Mexico.

The typical format of a Tijuana bible was a wallet-sized 2.5 in × 4 in (64 mm × 102 mm) 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.

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" (in which a door-to-door salesman named Ted starred in a series of ten episodic eight-page adventures) was one of the few original recurring characters created expressly for the bibles.

Little is known about the anonymous artists who produced the Tijuana bibles. Wesley Morse (who later went on to draw Bazooka Joe) 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.