Tijuana bible

Most Tijuana bibles were obscene parodies of popular newspaper comic strips at the time, such as "Blondie", "Barney Google", "Moon Mullins", "Popeye", "Tillie the Toiler", "The Katzenjammer Kids", "Dick Tracy", "Little Orphan Annie", and "Bringing Up Father".

Others made use of characters based on popular movie and sports stars of the day such as Mae West, W.C. Fields, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, The Marx Brothers, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe Louis, sometimes with names only subtly changed.

The subjects consisted of 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.

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.

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.

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 Fuller Brush Man series of comics".

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.

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.

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.

(Boston's Scollay Square, however, was a notorious place where Tijuana bibles could readily be purchased at seedy, hole-in-the-wall novelty shops patronized by sailors on leave.)

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.

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.

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 digest-sized newsstand joke books, Larch Publications.

[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!

"Mr. Dyslexic" was a seemingly clumsy, semi-literate artist who produced numerous titles in the postwar period, some with political content (e.g., Senator Robert A. Taft breaking a strike by sleeping with union members' wives).

"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.

[12] Rankin had a studio in midtown Manhattan, directly across the street from Macy's department store, where he produced commercial artwork on commission, so there is the possibility that assistants were involved.

The guilty barber blamed a mysterious stranger from Poughkeepsie who had supplied him with the merchandise (never identified, but possibly Abe Rubin, a pioneering Tijuana bible distributor, who was arrested in the nearby village of Wingdale in 1932[14]).

[15] A federal charge was also placed against them because some of the bibles had been shipped across state lines to Rochester, Minnesota,[16] home of the Mayo Clinic, where Cap'n Billy's Whiz Bang, America's leading outlet for guardedly smutty humor, is said to have gotten its start a few years earlier as a risque joke sheet passed around among the convalescing soldiers.

[17] "The arrests grew out of an investigation, which had been quietly going on for three or four weeks, following the finding that several Wiley high school boys were in possession of an obscene publication based on a current strip in the Sunday papers.

People would order "cartoon books" from the mysterious and ambiguously worded advertisements that appeared in the back pages of the Police Gazette starting in the late 1920s, but they had no way of knowing which they would receive.

The lease on the 2250 square foot loft had been taken out a year earlier by the Brotmans' brother-in-law, who was their partner in a bowling alley located in Manhattan under the George Washington Bridge.

Jacob Brotman was identified as one of the main players in the Tijuana bible trade in Jay Gertzman's Bookleggers and Smuthounds, and he 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 modern printing press which police could not confiscate because it turned out to be leased.

[32] The theme is reminiscent of a real-life episode described by Eisner about 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.

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.

[33][34] The young Hugh Hefner experimentally drew several Tijuana bibles as samples for a projected series which was never published, when he was a struggling cartoonist in Chicago in the early 1950s, around the same time that he issued his self-published cartoon book That Toddlin' Town.

[35] The title character in the 1959 semi-autobiographical Canadian novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler sells Tijuana bibles to his high school classmates, some featuring Dick Tracy, after buying them in bulk from a newsstand vendor who assigns him a small part of the city as his sales territory.

In the 2006 novel Water for Elephants, the term "eight-pager" is mentioned in several locations, one of these when Kinko the dwarf is caught masturbating by Jacob Jankowski while reading a Popeye the Sailor Tijuana bible.

The 1996 novel The Green Mile by Stephen King, features a scene in which guard Percy Wetmore is caught reading a Tijuana bible with fictional character "Lotta Leadpipe", and is asked what his mother would think of such material; this is included in the film version.

In 2008, comic artists Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall created an eight-page mock Tijuana bible lampooning President George W. Bush and Presidential hopeful John McCain entitled Obliging Lady.