As a matter of fact, though nobody has been eager to bring it up before, the Tijuana Bibles were the first real comic books in America to do more than merely reprint old newspaper strips, predating by five or ten years the format we've now come to think of as comics. In any case, without the Tijuana Bibles there would never have been a Mad magazine -- which brought a new ironic attitude into the world of media that has since become pervasive -- and without Mad there would never have been any iconoclastic underground comix in the sixties. Looking back from the present, a time simultaneously more liberated and more repressed than the decades that came before, it's difficult to conjure up the anarchic depth-charge of the Forbidden that those little dirty comics once carried. Because of their genuinely underground existence there is surprisingly little -- you should pardon the expression -- hard data available about the Tijuana Bibles. Much of my information comes from talking with people who remember them from their misspent youths, from a swell master's thesis for the University of Washington written by Robert Gluckson in 1992, and from a number of more or less sleazy reprint collections from marginally reputable publishers that I found in porno shops in the early seventies. These came complete with speculative introductions by sociologists, sexologists, psychologists, or possibly podiatrists -- anyone who could master a string of letters like BA or better after his name to add "socially redeeming value" to what otherwise might appear to be mere gatherings of hot stroke books. I never dreamed that I would someday mature into being a fellow producer of that species of prefactory prose, the least-read this side of small-appliance warranty notices. In boning up to write this essay I read about 300 of the 700 to 1,000 different Tijuana Bibles that are estimated to have been published, and I must confess that, like the clap, these comics are better in small doses. It may be due to their, let's say, undeviating devotion to one theme, but that recognized newspaper strip masterpiece, Krazy Kat, was no less single-minded in its repetitious variations on a kat getting conked with a brick. Nevertheless, be advised that this is an anthology better to dip into than swallow whole. The Tijuana Bibles probably weren't produced in Tijuana (or Havana, Paris or London, as some of the covers imply), and they obviously weren't Bibles. They were clandestinely produced and distributed small booklets that chronicled the explicit sexual adventures of America's beloved comic-strip characters, celebrities, and folk-heroes. The standard format consisted of eight poorly-printed 4"-wide by 3"-high black (or blue) and white pages and covers of a heavier colored stock. There were occasional deviant sizes and formats, most notably a number of especially rare epic-length sixteen-page and even thirty-two page pamphlets that are among the reprints that follow. These books might have been called Tijuana Bibles as gleefully sacrilegious pre-NAFTA slurs against Mexicans, to throw G-men off the trail, or because the West Coast border towns were an important supplier of all sorts of sin. In other regions of America they were also known as Eight-Pagers, Two-by-Fours, Gray-Backs, Bluesies, Jo-Jo Books, Tillie-and-Mac Books, Jiggs-and-Maggie Books, or simply as Fuck Books. They began appearing in the late twenties, flourished throughout the Depression years, and began to (I can't resist) peter out after World War II. The books were apparently ubiquitous in their heyday, a true mass medium, passed from hairy-palmed hand to hairy-palmed hand. According to one of Al Capp's assistants, when Capp had first created "Li'l Abner" and was fretting about whether or not it was destined for success, he breathed an enormous sigh of relief on hearing that his characters had been pirated into a Tijuana Bible -- he'd arrived! Distribution was strictly under the counter, out of the backs of station wagons, or from outsized overcoat pockets, and they were sold in schoolyards, garages, and barber shops. A new Bluesie would reportedly set you back between a hefty two bits (enough for a shave and a haircut or five loaves of bread) to as much as five bucks -- whatever the local traffic might bear. No one, of course, can say with certitude what the print runs were, but estimates range into the millions, since these illicit items could be bootlegged by anyone with access to a small printing press (or even, for some editions, mimeograph or rubber-stamp equipment). There don't seem to be records of publishers or artists being prosecuted, though shipments and salesmen were occasionally seized. It's not clear whether these publications were Mom-and-Pop operations or actually controlled by organized crime. When Will Eisner, the doyen of American comic-book artists, was still an innocent young teen working in a New York City printing shop, he recalls being solicited to draw Tijiuana Bibles at $3.00 a page by "a Mob type straight out of Damon Runyon, complete with pinkie ring, broken nose, black shirt, and white tie, who claimed to have 'exclusive distribution rights for all Brooklyn.'" The cartoonists were anonymous, and their ranks did not include Will Eisner (who described turning down the lucrative job offer as "one of the most difficult moral decisions of my life") or any of the actual creators of the original newspaper strips. The artist who single-handedly set the standard for all the rest, generating many more works than the dozen or so other practitioners in the field, was known until recently as "Mr. Prolific" (so tagged in the four volume Sex In Comics by Donald H. Gilmore, Ph.D.) or to some aficionados as "Square Knob." He has recently been identified as "Doc" Rankin by sexologist Gershon Legman, who claims to have met him in a cheap Scranton bookstore in the mid-thirties. Rankin, a World War I veteran, drew girlie cartoons for magazines aimed at cheering up ex-soldiers back from the liberated shores of Europe. His publisher, Larch Publications, produced off-color joke books for novelty and magic shops and might conceivably have branched out into producing hard-core under-the-counter material for this class of trade; certainly the aesthetic of the whoopee cushion and the ceramic dog turd permeates the Tijuana Bibles. "Doc" Rankin's manic classic, "The Love Guide," with Mae West and an all-star cartoon cast, appears on the following pages, as do several of his "Adventures of a Fuller Brush Man" and many others. He was not only the seminal influence on the genre, he was by far its most competent draftsman, drawing credible likenesses in complex entangled poses with graceful steel-pen strokes. This guy was good enough to earn an honest living had he so desired. Visibly enjoying his work, he offered good value, often adding extra gags and caricatures in frames inside frames. The only other creator of Eight-Pagers I can put a name to is the one who produced a series of booklets immortalizing the 1939 World's Fair. (See for example "She Saw the World's Fair -- and How," on page 68.) Although dubiously identified by Donald H. Gilmore, Ph.D., as the work of three lesbian friends from Chicago, I clearly recognize the hand of Wesley Morse, an artist I briefly met years ago when I first began working for the Topps Chewing Gum Company. Though his Eight-Pagers are often hurried and perfunctory, drawn by someone more interested in making the rent than making whoopee, they have a calligraphic, free-flowing charm. Early in his career, Morse had drawn cartoon features for the New York Graphic, and achieved some success as a gag cartoonist, but apparently had fallen on hard times by the thirties. In the fifties he reached the zenith of his career, drawing the "Bazooka Joe" comics that came wrapped around Bazooka bubble gum. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - > NEXT PAGE | When Rita Hayworth met Prince Aly Khan INTRODUCTION COPYRIGHT © 1997 BY ART SPIEGELMAN |
