Tijuana bible



Tijuana bibles (also known as eight-pagers, Tillie-and-Mac books, Jiggs-and-Maggie books, jo-jo books, bluesies, gray-backs, and two-by-fours) were little palm-sized pornographic comic books produced in the United States from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Their popularity peaked during the Great Depression era.

Most Tijuana bibles were obscene parodies of popular newspaper comic strips of the day, like "Blondie", "Barney Google", "Moon Mullins", "Popeye", "Tillie the Toiler", "Dick Tracy", "Little Orphan Annie", and "Bringing Up Father". Others made use of characters based on popular movie stars and sports stars of the day, like Mae West and Joe Louis, sometimes with names thinly changed. Before the war, almost all the stories were humorous and frequently were cartoon versions of well-known dirty jokes that had been making the rounds for decades.

Illegal, clandestine, and anonymous, the artists, writers, and publishers of these booklets are generally unknown. The quality of the artwork varied widely. The subjects are explicit sexual escapades usually featuring well known newspaper comic strip characters, movie stars, and (rarely) political figures, invariably used without respect for either copyright or libel law and without permission. Tijuana bibles repeated without a trace of self-consciousness the ethnic stereotypes found in popular culture at the time, although one Tijuana bible ("You Nazi Man") concluded on a serious note with a brief message from the publisher pleading for greater tolerance in Germany for the Jews.

The typical "bible" was an eight-panel comic strip in a wallet-size 2.5 × 4 inch format (approximately 7 × 10.5 cm) with black print on cheap white paper and running eight pages in length.

Characters
Tillie and Mac are thought to have been the first Tijuana bible stars, along with Maggie and Jiggs from the popular newspaper strip Bringing Up Father. Tillie was soon followed by Winnie Winkle, Dumb Dora, Dixie Dugan, Fritzi Ritz, Ella Cinders and other familiar comic strip characters stamped in the same mold. In the 1930s the most popular cartoon characters appearing in Tijuana bibles, judging by the number of their appearances, were Popeye and Blondie. The first celebrity bibles were based on real life newspaper tabloid sex scandals like the Peaches and Daddy Browning case which made headlines in 1926; ten years later an entire series of bibles by one unknown artist obscenely lampooned Mrs. Wallis Simpson and the King of England. By far the most popular celebrity character was Mae West, but virtually every major Hollywood star of the era was featured, obscenely and libelously, in the Tijuana bibles.

A popular comic strip character like Tillie or Blondie might appear in as many as 40 different eight-pagers drawn by ten different artists. An entire series of ten bibles drawn by Mr. Prolific was based on famous gangsters: Legs Diamond, Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly were featured; while the artist working under the alias "Elmer Zilch" drew a set of eight comics about famous boxers like Jack Dempsey. Another set of ten bibles drawn by Prolific featured radio stars including Joe Penner and Kate Smith. Blackjack drew a set of ten comics using characters from Snow White, with each of the seven dwarfs starring in his own X-rated title.

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 different cartoon characters or celebrities. For several months in 1935 Elmer Zilch and his publishers experimented with a ten-page format, issued in sets of eight with two-tone covers. Each panel in this series was surrounded by an intricate engraved arabesque border, hence the series became known to collectors as the "Ornate Borders" series. Only 42 bibles are thought by collectors to have been issued in this style, and most of them were soon being reprinted in truncated 8-page form.

In addition to comic strip characters and celebrities, many bibles featured nameless stock characters like cab drivers, firemen, traveling salesmen (and farmer's daughters), icemen, maids, and the like. Very few original recurring characters were created expressly for the bibles: Mr. Prolific's "Fuller Brush Man" was one, in which a door-to-door salesman named Ted starred in a series of ten episodic eight-page adventures. To many collectors this series was the epitome of the Tijuana bible genre; during the Senate racket investigations of the 1950s a New York businessman named Abe Rubin was even 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 Fuller Brush Man series of comics." The Fuller Brush man stories made a very weak stab at continuity (e.g. "The following week I was sent to Tallahassee" or somesuch words at the commencement of each installment), but 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 each before concluding.

History
The term "Tijuana bibles," which was first noted in Southern California in the late 1940s, refers to the apocryphal belief that they were manufactured and smuggled across the border from Tijuana, Mexico. In the 1930s many early bibles bore phony imprints of non-existent companies like "London Press", "La France Publishing," and "Tobasco Publishing Co." in London, Paris, and Havana; these imprints are universally regarded as false. The popular line using the "Tobasco" imprint was around the underground market for a couple of years and in addition to about 60 Tijuana bible titles, most of them original, also printed a number of pamphlet-sized erotic fiction readers.

Tijuana bibles were sold under the counter for a dollar or 50 cents in places where men congregated: barrooms, bowling alleys, garages, tobacco shops, barber shops and burlesque houses. One commentator reminisces:

"I came of age during the war and served in the United States Navy, and I recall seeing them behind the counter at magazine stands and bus terminals, in penny arcades, and in dusty little second-hand bookshops. During their last years of production, the late 1950s and early 1960s, the little second-hand book and curio shops seem to have been their primary distribution outlets."

In some senses, Tijuana bibles were the first underground comix. They featured original material at a time when legitimate American comic books were still reprinting newspaper strips. After World War II, both the quality and the popularity of the Tijuana bible declined.

Comics artist and historian Art Spiegelman notes that records of prosecutions against publishers and artists for making Tijuana bibles do not seem to exist; the cartoonist added, however, that on occasion authorities seized shipments and people selling Tijuana bibles. According to Spiegelman, it's 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.

In the early days Tijuana bibles could be shipped in bulk around the country through commercial express offices, usually the Railway Express firm. It was a serious criminal offense to send them via the US mail, and one small time operator was sentenced to 5 years in Leavenworth in 1932 for simply soliciting orders from his customers through the US mail (at a dollar per bible: "These are not the cheap kind"), even though he guaranteed to ship them by commercial express. When the mails were used, complex schemes were used to foil postal inspectors, involving mail-forwarding, one-time use postal boxes, and non-existent addresses. The high success rate of the postal authorities in defeating these schemes is the main reason that bibles were generally sold locally rather than through the mails. When a seller was arrested and prosecuted for violating a local ordinance the penalties were far lower than if a federal offense was committed; usually a seller got off with a 30 day sentence, a $100 fine or probation after a local arrest, at least on a first offense.

When easy access to commercial shipping was suddenly cut off in the mid-1930s, manufacturers began driving the products themselves to various underground depots around the country in cars and vans, taking advantage of a loophole making it not a federal crime (at that time) to take pornography across state lines in a private vehicle. The small size of the bibles made them easy to transport: 50,000 bibles could fit in the trunk of a car. Clandestine distribution centers were located in a chain of large cities on an east-west axis from New York City to Kansas City, loosely following the route of the old National Road and generally avoiding the South and New England which were regarded as dangerous places to be arrested for pornography, although Boston's Scollay Square was notoriously a place where Tijuana bibles could readily be purchased at seedy, hole-in-the-wall novelty shops patronized by sailors on leave. Business was always done on a strictly cash basis, with generous discounts for bulk purchases to the local distributors who then resold them to retail vendors. The local distributors were not members of organized crime syndicates but seedy small businessmen in an illegal black market business; the same vendors also handled cheap, off-brand black market condoms. A distributor's "territory" might be a large city or an entire state.

The total number of Tijuana bibles printed and sold in the heyday of the bibles in the 1930s was in the millions. But the number of new Tijuana bibles being produced took a nosedive at the beginning of World War II, and the industry never recovered. 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, may have been factors in the decline of the Tijuana bibles at this time. 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.

When the business was revived after the war the quality of new bibles was dismal. Both poorly drawn and badly printed, they 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 (Journeyman), whom Mr. Dyslexic then proceeded to acknowledge by making Caldwell himself the star of another scabrous Tijuana bible ("Erskine Caldwell in Grandpa's Revenge").

Artists
Little is known about the anonymous artists who produced the Tijuana bibles. Wesley Morse (who later went on to draw Bazooka Joe) is believed to have drawn many of those appearing shortly before WWII, most notably about a dozen titles inspired by the 1939 World's Fair. A number of books have alleged that the freelance cartoonist Doc Rankin was the creator of numerous Tijuana bibles in the 1930s, although this remains unproven. Gershon Legman, who had been around the New York City erotic book trade in the 1930s, claimed that Rankin was paid $35 weekly to produce two eight pagers, delivering the work to Lou Shomer, a gadfly book trade personality chiefly remembered today for testifying against Ben Rebhuhn at the Falstaff Press pornography trial and as the author of a manual of tap-dancing. In addition to his identification of Rankin, Legman also claimed to know that one of the major Tijuana bible artists was a woman, possibly referring to Blackjack.

Collectors have assigned names to several anonymous artists with recognizable styles: "Mr. Prolific" (the creator of the "Adventures of a Fuller Brush Man" series, and the master of a sure-handed, elegant steel pen inking style; sometimes said to have been Rankin); "Mr. Dyslexic" (a clumsy, semi-literate artist who produced numerous titles in the postwar period, some with political content (e.g., Senator Robert Taft breaking a strike by sleeping with union members' wives); "Blackjack", whose work, which frequently depicted imaginary pairings of famous Hollywood movie stars, featured large black areas and often resembled linoleum block prints; and "Elmer Zilch" (also known as "Artist No. 4"), an early and witty creator of the 1930s who rivaled Mr. Prolific in talent, popularity and productivity, and who may also have been Rankin. Rankin had a studio in midtown Manhattan where he produced commercial artwork on commission, so there is the possibility that assistants were involved.

Commentators have claimed to discern the styles of from a dozen to twenty different artists who produced 10 or more bibles during their heyday, with the most productive artists, Mr. Prolific and Elmer Zilch, 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 between them may have drawn half of all the Tijuana bibles ever done. There were also two anonymous artists in the 1950s who each drew about 60 to 80 cheaply produced titles, sold for a dime each to a clientele which allegedly consisted largely of high school boys; these late-period bible series included titles like "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 different 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 is unknown but has been estimated by Art Spiegelman to be between 700 and 1000. These were endlessly reprinted, redrawn, and pirated, with nearly illegible nth-generation copies circulating decades after the originals were first issued.

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 8-pagers but showcased the artists' best work.

Police seizures
One of the earliest known Tijuana bible arrests occurred in Terre Haute in 1926, when a druggist was arraigned for selling them under the counter after a cache of bibles was discovered in a high school locker. Police traced the source back to a highly respected local newspaper editor named Charles Jewett (managing editor of the Terre Haute Star) and his son, a job printer. Father and son left town shortly afterward. It is not known today which particular bibles were involved, but the earliest bibles are sometimes dated to 1925, particularly early "Tillie and Mac" and "Maggie and Jiggs" stories which at the time were issued without covers or titles, and were not always 8 pages long. The Kinsey Institute has in its possession an early Tillie and Mac story involving Mac finding a used condom in Tillie's wastebasket ("I wondered where that had gone," she says brightly), which has an archivist's notation "First seen Oklahoma 1926."

The scale on which Tijuana bibles were produced can be gauged from the large hauls announced in police seizures. In one November, 1942 raid by FBI agent P.E. Foxworth and his men on a New York City warehouse and a printing plant in the South Bronx, 8 million bibles were reported seized, and small time businessmen Jacob and David Brotman were arrested along with several associates.

According to the FBI four tons of material were ready to ship across the country and 7 tons had already gone out and were being rounded up at regional distribution centers in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland/Akron, Indianapolis, and Kansas City. Jacob Brotman, identified as one of the main players in the Tijuana bible trade in Jay Gertzman's Bookleggers and Smuthounds, had previously been arrested in a similar raid on a Lower East Side loft reported in the New York City papers in 1936, which produced a large haul of bibles, erotic fiction "readers", pornographic playing cards, and nude photos, along with cutting and binding equipment and an expensive printing press.

During the 1939 World's Fair men selling pornographic booklets on the midway at the fair were trailed to a warehouse near the Brooklyn Navy Yard where David Brotman and an associate were arrested and a cache of 350,000 printed items and photos and 50,000 condoms were seized, along with printing plates. Collectors have estimated that in this period as many as 50,000 copies would be produced of a single title, and distributed around the country by an underground network of colporteurs.

In New York City police raids on the business, which were carried out at intervals for decades, were usually at the instigation of John S. Sumner and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which during the years of its existence closely watched the trade in pornography in the city. In Boston, this function was carried out by the Watch and Ward Society, which exchanged information with Sumner's organization in New York to coordinate their efforts; there was also a similar group in Chicago, the Illinois Vigilance Association led by Rev. Philip Yarrow. In one of Mr. Prolific's bibles he mocks these foes in the form of a guardian of public morals named "Smuthound", who apprehends Betty Boop while she is innocently engaged in having sex with a lifeguard on the beach (Betty Boop in "Improvising").

The FBI monitored the Tijuana bible trade but rarely made arrests. A large file of specimen bibles was maintained at FBI headquarters, eventually compromising over 5,000 items, for the purpose of tracing printers and distributors.

Cultural references
Early in the graphic novel Watchmen, the current Silk Spectre, Laurie Juspeczyk visits her mother, past Silk Spectre Sally Jupiter, and briefly reads a Tijuana bible featuring her. Sally finds it flattering and keeps it as a reminder of her past sex appeal, but Laurie finds the comic obscene. The same Tijuana bible is later given away as a gift, owing to its present nature as a collector's novelty item.

Will Eisner features Tijuana bibles in the first pages of his book The Dreamer, though nothing explicit is shown. His protagonist, Billy, a young artist out looking for work, is offered a job illustrating them by a printer and a mobster. Shocked and incensed, he asks if they are legal. The vignette serves not only to focus conflict between the character's dream and reality, but also between legitimate and illicit comic production. Dejected, Billy says he will think it over. The theme is reminiscent of a real-life episode described by Eisner about his being asked by a shady Brooklyn businessman to draw for the publications at a rate of $3 a page, which was good money at the time.

Joe Shuster drew Tijuana-bible-like illustrations for an underground bondage-themed erotic series called Nights of Horror in the early 1950s; his male characters are strongly reminiscent of Superman and some of his female characters resemble Lois Lane. Thousands of copies of Nights of Horror were seized in a police raid on a Times Square book store, but Shuster's name did not come to light in the ensuing prosecution.

In the semi-autobiographical Canadian novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) by Mordecai Richler, the title character sells Tijuana bibles, some featuring Dick Tracy, to his high school classmates, after buying them in bulk from a newsstand vendor who assigns him a small part of the city as his sales territory. When he hears that the news vendor has been arrested he panics and destroys all the bibles.

In the novel Water for Elephants, the term "eight-pager" is mentioned in several different locations, one of these when Kinko the dwarf is caught by Jacob Jankowski masturbating while reading a Popeye the Sailor Tijuana bible.

The novel and film The Green Mile features a scene in which guard Percy Whitmore is caught reading a Tijuana bible with fictional character "Lotta Leadpipe", and is asked what his mother would think of such material.

A 1954 episode of Dragnet, "The Big Producer", had Sgt. Joe Friday breaking up a high school smut ring which includes a teenage boy (played by Martin Milner) selling eight-pagers out of his school locker. The term "Tijuana Bible" was used in the 1968 Dragnet episode "The Starlet".

During Year Six (2007) of the webcomic Something Positive the lead character, Davan MacIntire, discovers that the man he is named after, a cousin of his grandfather, had worked as a writer/artist of Tijuana bibles in the late 1930s. Randy Milholland, the creator of Something Positive, then created a spin-off series, Something Positive 1937, to tell the story of the first Davan.