Cover and first panel of a 1940s–50s Tijuana bible that is a parody of the comic strip Blondie. The panels pictured here are quite tame; the rest of the comic is quite pornographic. A drawing of the character Dagwood Bumstead in his office with a naked woman.
12 April 2021
A Tijuana bible is a palm-sized, pornographic comic book, a genre that was popular from the 1930s into the 1950s. The name Tijuana comes from the fact that they were often printed in Mexico and then smuggled across the border into the United States, the bible is a jocular usage. Many Tijuana bibles were pornographic parodies of mainstream comics or featured luridly drawn sexual escapades of Hollywood stars. Production quality varied, from crudely to skillfully drawn.
The folklorist and journalist Ed Cray documented a use of the term from 1947 in the journal Western Folklore:
Tijuana Bible—pornographic comic books, in a three-inch by five-inch format, parodying well known comic strips. These are most often purchased over the California-Baja California border. (Los Angeles, 1947)
Unfortunately, Cray did not record a full citation of his find. (He was fourteen years old in 1947, so perhaps it is a memory from his teenage years in Los Angeles, which would make the exact date somewhat suspect—if that is the case it should have been labeled “circa.”) But we have confirmed evidence of the term from 18 June 1955, when Tijuana bibles were described in a U. S. Senate hearing on juvenile delinquency. The following exchange is between James H. Bobo, a senate staffer, and Phillip Barnes, a Los Angeles police officer assigned to the vice division:
MR. BOBO. In the investigation of cases involving pornographic literature, what is the type that is most prevalent in the hands of those of juvenile age?
MR. BARNES. I would say the most prevalent would be the type known to us, or in the language of the people who deal in it, as the Tijuana Bible, which is a small booklet about 2 by 3 inches, of a cartoon type, that is very lewd and very obscene in its character.
MR. BOBO. It shows all types of sexual perversions?
MR. BARNES. Yes; it does.
A more lurid, but short of obscene, description of Tijuana bibles can be found in writer Bernard Wolfe’s 1972 autobiography, Memoirs of a Not Altogether Sly Pornographer:
“I'll explain it to you, Tijuana Bible's a nickname for a certain type funnies, like so.” The thing he took from his desk drawer to pass across was a comic book, in full color, on paper that upped five or six grades could have been used for Kleenex. All the characters, I saw as I leafed through, were known American ones, but their words as captured in the balloons over their heads were all in Spanish, more, they'd all lost their clothes, every last button and string, and were heel-kick-ingly happy about it, judging from the shrapnel they all were generating—ripples, shimmers, shooting stars, pows, bams and exclamation points, judging further from the interpersonal antics they were engaged in with all portions of their bared anatomies. These carefree cutups didn't have any problem relating to others, they were relating in every way the epidermis allows, variously coupling, tripleting, communing, nosing, mouthing, fingering, backbending, splitting, three-decker-sandwiching. Moon Mullins was ringmaster for a tightly interwoven daisy chain that Dagwood was working hard to unravel. (Thanatos forever trying to undo Eros's best work, where will it end.) Mickey Mouse had had a knockdown fight with Minnie Mouse. He’d decided to cut all troublemaking females out of his life and go it on his own. Just now he was exploring the insertive possibilities in a slab of Swiss cheese while over on the far side, unknown to him, Minnie was energetically reaping the benefits of his probes. The Katzenjammer Kids were here revealing themselves as powerhouse-jammers. The object of their ramrod affections was none other than Little Orphan Annie. Aided and abetted by a slavering Daddy Warbucks, they were using that diminutive Brillo-haired lady as a human pincushion, entering her at every passageway as though to make the point, long before Sartre, about there being no exits. I took no pleasure in what was being done to that little slip of a girl though I’d always thought she was too big for her britches (now missing) and needed to be taken down a few pegs for her protofascist leanings.
In his 2001 Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, Joseph Slade gives a synopsis of the history of the genre:
In his Introduction [to Sex Comics Classics], Raymond says that dirty comics originated in California. By contrast, Maurice Horn in Sex in the Comics argues less persuasively that the eight-pagers owe their beginnings to semipolitical Cuban examples; then, transformed by American cultural imperatives, they began to parody mainstream cartoon characters. Horn is more accurate when he notes that by 1950 “the eight-pagers had become tired and repetitive, every character and every situation had been milked to the fullest, and there were few sexual variations left to explore. The booklets finally petered out in the fifties (when cheap and heavily censored versions were advertised for sale through the mails, in contrast to the real items, which were generally sold under the counter). When the more permissive era of the sixties opened up new fields for the graphic depiction of sex, they simply became objects of curiosity and even nostalgia.” Raymond points out that sadomasochism is not common in Tijuana bibles, which almost always depict garden-variety sex, albeit with humorous or ironic twists.
While Tijuana bible technically refers to the specific genre of pornography, in later years use of the term sometimes widened to include any type of pornography. For instance, there is this definition for Bruce Rodgers’s 1972 The Queen’s Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon:
Tijuana Bible really putrid pornography “I’m wallpapering my den in Tijuana Bible.”
Pornographic comics still exist as a genre, especially common is the manga sub-genre of hentai, that is pornographic comics drawn in the Japanese style, but the Tijuana bible itself is a thing of the past.
Sources:
Cray, Ed. “Ethnic and Place Names as Derisive Adjectives.” Western Folklore, 21.1, January 1962, 34. JSTOR.
Eisiminger, Sterling. “Glossary of Ethnic Slurs in American English.” Maledicta, 3.2, Winter 1979, 167.
Rodgers, Bruce. The Queen’s Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972, 197. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Slade, Joseph W. Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide, vol. 3 of 3. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001, 933–34. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Testimony of Phillip I. Barnes, Police Officer, City of Los Angeles, Attached to the Administrative Vice Division, Pornographic Detail” (18 June 1955). Hearing Before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency. Committee on the Judiciary, U. S. Senate, 84th Congress, 1st Session. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1956, 374. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Wolfe, Bernard. Memoirs of a Not Altogether Sly Pornographer. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972, 18–19. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: Unknown artist. From: Adelman, Bob. Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930s–1950s. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1997, 39. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.