Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funn… (2024)

I had intended to severely down star Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s but I have to agree with an earlier reviewer who called it kitschy. For the unfamiliar, the Tijuana Bibles were a long running series of usually 8 page underground pornographic, make that highly pornographic cartoon strips. This book brings them together by the score with glued in more or less pertinent comments and a fairly reasonable set of academic appreciations. Manifestly not intended for the young readers and only for the coffee tables of the more sophisticated.

The 8 pager Tijuana Bibles were intended to be graphic depictions of sex, usually in a predictable sequence with certain standard expectations. The men may be ugly or attractive, the women always attractive if not as buxomly as in more recent appeals to the male prurience.. The men are always heavily endowed and the women rarely need much in the way of seduction before or cuddling after. Mostly everyone has a good time indulging in ultimate canoodling. This is sex by the numbers with a few variations such as ‘pearl diving’ aka ‘yodeling in the valley’ or three sums and only rarely any reference to other than heterosexual activity.

Read in very small doses, one can consider the variations in artistic style and competence; look for possible unique drawing styles, and thereby clues towards authorship. The Bibles were published without attribution, surprise. There are some legitimate claims to social satire and an awareness outside of the sexual urges. In mass the Bibles are tedious, dull, predictable and repetitious.

A running convention to the Bibles was to evoke actors, public figures and current events at the time of publication. There are strips about Al Capone, Babe Ruth, Hitler, almost everyone on stage or in Hollywood. So yes to both Mae West and WC Fields. Unfortunately the editor of the collection, Bob Adelman shoves in some terrible explanations of who the person was who was the inspiration or the target of an image rip off, in-every-8-pager. These get annoying.

Almost everything wrong with this collection can be avoided by an otherwise interested reader if they treat Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies as a coffee table book. Such is the format and such is the best way with which to deal. Like most coffee table books:

1.It is for decor, leave it on the table.
2.Furtively glance through it while waiting for your host/hostess to return with your drink of choice

It's time for a history lesson boys and girls. We often forget that sex has been around a whole lot longer than we have. Many believe that it began with the Summer of Love in the late 60s. Before that, everything was prim, proper and whitewashed to perfection. People were politely prudish in the first half of the century and sex was something practiced only for procreation. And the same was true for all of the boring and staid centuries which had come before. Right? Wrong! Sex has been around as long as we have. More importantly, as long as there has been a society to frown upon it's misuse, Sex has held a morbid fascination in the minds of the creative and the prurient alike.

That's the lesson to be learned in the pages of this, formerly underground and hotly debated, offering from Bob Adelman and his collective of open-minded historians. The Tijuana Bibles hold a very special place in the annals of sexual history. Their overall crudeness and single-minded devotion to the simple act of intercourse aside, those little pamphlets kicked open the doors for such pioneering visual efforts to follow as Playboy, Mad Magazine and the underground comix of the 60s, among many others.

But what exactly were the Tijuana Bibles? Artist Art Spiegelman sums it up best in his forward when he describes the Bibles as, "clandestinely produced and distributed small booklets that chronicled the explicit sexual adventures of America's beloved comic-strip characters, celebrities and folk heroes." Bold and bawdy, the Tijuana Bibles broke all the rules and flirted dangerously with the First Amendment, during a time when few even knew that Amendment existed. Wholly illegal and often hidden away by those who were connoisseurs of the art form, their existence was often questioned and sometimes even dismissed by those moral police of the time who had bigger fish to fry, like the motion picture industry.

But Tijuana Bibles isn't just a history book. It's also a thoroughly enjoyable romp through the demented underbelly of our forefathers. Here you will see such recognizable cartoon strip characters as Popeye, Mutt & Jeff, Tarzan, Betty Boop, Blondie & Dagwood, Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon and even Mickey Mouse doing the nasty. Another section is devoted exclusively to movie stars of the era, including W.C. Fields, Laurel & Hardy, The Marx Brothers, Joan Crawford, Mae West, Cary Grant, Clark Gable and James Cagney.

It's obvious where the appeal lies in all this. After all, who hasn't imagined what's going on in that van when the kids of Scooby Doo aren't off solving mysteries? And the whole Roger and Jessica Rabbit thing? C'mon! With further sections on gangsters, folk heroes and politically incorrect stereotypes, these raunchy "strips" offer panel after panel of naughty, hedonistic pleasure for the mind's eye. A word of warning, however. Though they can be addictive, these little babies are best taken in small doses. Not just so that you can savor and enjoy them, but because they do tend to blend together after a time. I mean, how many different ways can one depict vanilla comic strip sex? Nuff said.

My favorite one is where Popeye's father Pappy breaks down a door with his three-foot-long penis.

The main interest here is the generous sampling of the "bibles" reproduced, though some-times the quality is pretty poor—some are difficult to read or see properly. There are some odd decisions (e.g. not to reprint the full run of the "Fuller Brush Man" ones, given their apparent high quality). Least interesting is the textual content, which is generally superficial despite the impressive-sounding title for the book. Still, it's an interesting historical artifact

I'm way too much of a prude to really enjoy Tijuana Bibles. But I have to admit, I'm fascinated by them -- and I can't help but admire the power of these pamphlets to shock me 70+ years after their creation.

I found this to be absolutely hilarious - loved it!

Some of these are really, really funny.

Interesting from a historical perspective ;)

I was never sure that the "Tijuana Bibles" mentioned so often in Stephen King's prison novels actually existed. But this book by Bob Adelman and legendary cartoonist/historian Art Spiegelman makes the case that these subversive pornographic cartoons left a legacy worth examining. On their own, yeah, the cartoons are terrible: usually poorly drawn, smutty without being artistic, repetitive, terribly written and often casually racist and sexist. But they give us a window into the underclass of the depression era and beyond, the transgressive and subversive nature of fan art and parody, and more than anything a look at the mentality of the time, when gender roles were assumed to be immutable and "fancy" sexual practices (i.e. anything other than missionary) was assumed to be for Europeans or homosexuals only.

A fantastic introduction to the what and whys of Tijuana Bibles. Of course, now, you can find a ton of them online, but largely without context. From the well plotted introduction to continual notes throughout the book, this was a great little slice of Americana. Porn says a lot about the people consuming it and the culture generating it, and these little books are no exception to the rule.

If you're remotely prudish or uncomfortable with very graphic and politically incorrect pornography, this probably isn't the book for you

A fantastic introduction to the what and whys of Tijuana Bibles. Of course, now, you can find a ton of them online, but largely without context. From the well plotted introduction to continual notes throughout the book, this was a great little slice of Americana. Porn says a lot about the people consuming it and the culture generating it, and these little books are no exception to the rule.

If you're remotely prudish or uncomfortable with very graphic and politically incorrect pornography, this probably isn't the book for you.

kinky perverted 1900's pornographic cartoons... Where else can you see Brutus fucking popeye??

Remember the good old days when no body talked about nasty old sex? Well hang that illusion up. Dont leave this book out where your kids can see it!

Raunchy piece of history

“Tijuana Bibles,” were neither made in Tijuana, nor were they biblical in content—except in the biblical sense of a whole lot of “knowing,” going on. Oh, and many times they included Borscht Belt-esque puns about Adam and Eve getting it on the Garden of Eden.
What they were, instead, were little comic books, printed on cheap stock and created by anonymous artists, depicting various sex acts. The acts many times involved famous figures of the day, and thus had a satirical bent, no matter how unsophisticated. Sex acts ranged from the cute and even endearing to the outright depraved. To give you an example of the kind of range shown here, there are images of Mae West making whoopie beneath an apple tree with a farm boy and a comic in which Hitler eats a man’s severed penis off a plate in his famed “Wolf’s Lair” bunker.
The overall impression, though, is more endearing than shocking. In a time where pornography has become ubiquitous enough for teachers to get doxxed on the daily for their Only Fans accounts, how can these slyly immature panels be received as anything but quaint? And for every weird scatological catalogue of depraved acts performed by dictators—Mussolini, Mao, and Stalin show up to help der Führer—there are ten or twenty comics showing people just enjoying sex.
If you remember that back then even something as simple as cunnilingus was suspect and there was no Sex Ed, you can see how these books even performed a bit of a service. They helped youngsters see what was actually involved in the act, and even showed young men that a woman’s pleasure was part of the sexual contract. And for the adults, the comics (or maybe comix, since these were underground) provided reassurance that sex—while sometimes full of consequences, and thus not to be taken lightly—was nothing to be ashamed of.
It's fun to watch the Puritans and spoilsports get poked in the eye, and some of the drawings are actually topnotch, high equality enough to have been featured in The New Yorker. If, of course, you remove the images of the “pearl fishing” and “kidney probing,” going on within the covers.
The work is also bookended by an intro by none other than comix luminary and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman. That, and some captions providing biographical and cultural context to the comics even gives this thing an air of respectability. You will actually learn a bit, while laughing, and shaking your head. Recommended.

funny

So that's what "Eight-Pagers" was about!

hot-cha!