Mr. Prolific probably never won any spelling bees and occasionally stumbled over difficult words like feud and their, but only the loutish Mr. Dyslexic could write, when Rita Hayworth first meets Prince Aly Khan (in "We Could Make a Million," page 107): "Rita come appon this seene and deciedes she must have some of this lovely prick." In the same short narrative he has Aly admire Rita's "loushes cunt," saying "It feel like I could get my hole hand in." Miraculously the artist spells the word weight with absolute precision in panel 1, but reverts to the more creative wieght in the last panel. His virulent, know-nothing anti-Communism, and his visualization about Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss's homosexual affair are significant primary sources for understanding America's Zeitgeist at mid-century; but I sheepishly admit that his work makes me want to reach for a red pencil rather than a Kleenex. There's a mean-spirited malignance to Mr. Dyslexic's misogyny, xenophobia, and racism that compares unfavorably to the rather sweet misogyny, xenophobia, and racism in many of the earlier Tijuana Bibles. I use the word "sweet" advisedly, since most of the Eight-Pagers exude the wide-eyed innocence of, say, Guy Lombardo's hot and sweet college jazz band of the twenties or the bawdy thirties lyrics of "Ukelele Ike," who ended his career as the voice of Jiminy Cricket crooning "When You Wish Upon a Star." Though the Eight-Pagers did traffic heavily in nasty stereotypes, they were primarily carriers of a virus that infected all strata of our popular culture, certainly including the movies, radio shows, and comic strips they parodied. In fact, since cartoons are a visual sign language, the stereotype is the basic building block of all cartoon art. Cartoonists can overcome this apparent limitation and often achieve complexity of thought, but it's useful to look at the Tijuana Bibles as laboratory models of the comic-strip format at its most basic. There's a good marriage of form and content in these books: pornography and cartoons are both about the stripping-away of dignity; both depend on exaggeration; and both deploy what Susan Sontag, in "The Pornographic Imagination," calls "a theater of types, never of individuals." Granted, due to the monomaniacal focus of the scenarios, there is an even more limited palette of types in the Tijuana Bibles than in the actual newspaper comics. The women may be bright or dumb, innocent or seasoned, but all are horny to the point of insatiability. The main issue is whether they play "hide the weenie" solely for pleasure or for fun and profit. The men, handsome or (more often) not, are limited to old-and-horny or young-and-horny. Yet, at their most effective, the characters in the Eight-Pagers remain true to their legit media counterparts. Harpo Marx is as blithely unaware of appropriate behavior in these comics as he is in the movies; it's just that here Groucho scolds him for somehow using "a ladies ass for a harp. It's for jazzing only." Major Hoople was always a blowhard in the funny papers, it's more literal in these books. The colonialist wish-fulfillment implicit in Tarzan is only made more clear by having him KO a minstrel-lipped savage about to rape a white goddess who then admires and uses "the most stupendous [white!] joy prong in all Africa." The Fuck Books were not overtly political but were by their nature anti-authoritarian, a protest against what Freud called Civilization and Its Discontents. Here was a populist way to rebel against the mass media and advertising designed to titillate and manipulate, but never satisfy. Betty Boop, Greta Garbo, and Clara Bow all radiated sex appeal on screen, but they were cock-teasers, never quite delivering what they promised -- especially after 1934, when the Hollywood Hays office went into high gear. A related impulse expresses itself on the Internet today, with newsgroups posting digitized JPEG images of Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast making what Shakespeare called "the beast with two backs," trading extended and explicit chain stories of the sex lives of the "Star Trek" crew, and -- thanks to the wizardry of Photoshop -- swapping naked pictures of the cast of "Gilligan's Island." The frisson in this high-tech version of Tijuana Bibles seems to have at least as much to do with the thrill of violating copyright and licensing law as with sexual need. In the thirties it was simply a tremendous relief to find out exactly what Blondie and Dagwood did between their daily stints in the newspaper that led to the birth of their Baby Dumpling. After all, comics are a gutter medium; that is, it's what takes place in the gutters between the panels that activates the medium. Of course comics have been seen as a gutter medium in the more obvious sense of the term ever since the Yellow Kid ushered in the first Sunday comics supplements at the turn of the century. The genteel classes have long expressed outrage at their vulgarity and tried to have them squelched as a threat to literacy and a corrupting influence on children. The funnies were certainly read by kids, but a 1938 Gallup poll showed that about 70 percent of all American adults followed them faithfully too. It's difficult to over-estimate how central comics were to our mass culture in the days before cathode rays beamed images into every home. Perhaps it's their primal and direct visual appeal that has given them a bum rap as a kid's medium and made them so very vulnerable to the censor's wrath. In 1994, Michael Diana, a Florida cartoonist whose self-published small-press comic book, "Boiled Owl," is clearly aimed at adults, became the first cartoonist in America to be convicted of obscenity. One of the draconian terms of his probation actually enjoined him from having any contact with minors! It's a dangerous business, cartooning. The essential magic of comics is that a few simple words and marks can conjure up an entire world for a reader to enter and believe in. Presumably, this is true of erotic comics as well; how else can one explain the willingness to spend hard Depression-era currency to be aroused by a very primitively drawn Donald Duck schtupping an ineptly drawn Minnie Mouse? It's precisely this miraculous ability to suspend disbelief and temporarily blur Image and Reality that arouses the ire of those puritanical censors of the Left and Right who can confuse depictions of rape with actual rape. It's a profound confusion of categories as well as a scrambling of symptom and cause. Though there are bound to be those who will loudly declaim that the Tijuana Blues demean women, I think it important to note that they demean everyone, regardless of gender, ethnic origin, or even species. It's what cartoons do best, in fact. It's also crucial to point out that there actually are no women in these books. This is a genre drawn primarily, if not entirely, by men for an audience of men, depicting women with omnivorous male libidos. In "Dear Elsie," a Sixteen-Pager by O. Whattacan, Tillie writes, "I couldn't hold my wad any longer so I let it fly -- did I flood him. It gushed out like a volcano eruption," and goes on to call the mustachioed guy who tickled her "pussey" with his tongue a "cocksucker." In "When Mother Was a Girl," a Rannkin production on page 59, women are described as having "overheated nuts." Yes, I've heard of female ejaculation and I know that slang words often shift in meaning through time, but I'm sure it's actually a clue: these are all guys with cunts, ready and eager to physically glom onto any creature or object anywhere near their reproductive organs. Depression-Era Man had a hard time adjusting to the threat of the newly liberated and recently enfranchised Modern Woman, who had just entered the work force, and these comics all show signs of this stress. There's a big wad of anxiety squirting through these slimy little books. It's rarely displayed as overtly as in the atypically vicious Bonnie Parker booklet on page 115, Amputated, where our cigar-chomping heroine severs an enormous (even by a Tijuana Bible's generous standards) penis and preserves it in alcohol as a souvenir of some really hot bellywhacking. The malaise in the Eight-Pagers is more often expressed in the form of the totally drained male (drained of come or money, depending on which of the two basic humor templates is being applied). This sort of psycho-sociological analysis is important, but inevitably sounds like a defensive ploy to inject some Socially Redeeming Value into the concupiscent stew. Paul Krassner, editor of "The Realist" and, briefly, "Hustler," aptly insisted that "appealing to the prurient interest is a socially redeeming value." The Tijuana Bibles were the sex-education manuals of their time. In entertaining and easy-to-read cartoon diagrams, the Beavises and Buttheads of an earlier age could painlessly learn what to put where, and how to move it once they put it there. Significantly, these books spread the hot news that women actually enjoyed sex and that even fat people like Oliver Hardy and Kate Smith could be sexy. They taught that, despite the mortifying shame of it all, cunnilingus (in these books called "pearl fishing," "whistling in the whiskers," or "yodeling in the canyon") was fun. To understand how shameful oral sex was believed to be, class, you need only to turn to "Mussolini in Ethiopia" on page 124, a giddily primitive Eight-Pager drawn by Mr. Dyslexic's dad, with its memorable punch line: "You-like-to-have-your-pussy-sucked-I-get-Hitler-for-you."
These old Jo-Jo Books do have a liberating "any-port-in-a-storm" polymorphous perversity, but most of them seem far more wholesome than your typical Calvin Klein billboard. They portray a buoyant, priapic world in which lust overcomes everything, even bad drawing, bad grammar, bad jokes and bad printing. So, to quote from one Sixteen-Pager: "Now for some exciting moments -- all set -- keep your hands still."
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