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Tijuana bibles (also known as eight-pagers, Tillie-and-Mac books, Jiggs-and-Maggie books, jo-jo books, bluesies, gray-backs, and two-by-fours) were palm-sized pornographic comic books produced in the United States from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Their popularity peaked during the Great Depression era. Most Tijuana bibles were obscene parodies of popular newspaper comic strips of the day, like "Blondie", "Barney Google", "Moon Mullins", "Popeye", "Tillie the Toiler", "Dick Tracy", "Little Orphan Annie", and "Bringing Up Father". Others made use of characters based on popular movie stars and sports stars of the day, like Mae West and Joe Louis, sometimes with names thinly changed. Before the war, almost all the stories were humorous and frequently were cartoon versions of well-known dirty jokes that had been making the rounds for decades. Illegal, clandestine, and anonymous, the artists, writers, and publishers of these booklets are generally unknown. The quality of the artwork varied widely. The subjects are 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. Tijuana bibles repeated without a trace of self-consciousness the ethnic stereotypes found in popular culture at the time, although one Tijuana bible ("You Nazi Man") concluded on a serious note with a brief message from the publisher pleading for greater tolerance in Germany for the Jews.〔 The typical "bible" was an eight-panel comic strip in a wallet-size 2.5 × 4 inch format (approximately 7 × 10.5 cm) with black print on cheap white paper and running eight pages in length. ==Characters== Tillie and Mac are thought to have been the first Tijuana bible stars, along with Maggie and Jiggs from the popular newspaper strip ''Bringing Up Father''. 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. In the 1930s the most popular cartoon characters appearing in Tijuana bibles, judging by the number of their appearances, were Popeye and Blondie. The first celebrity bibles were based on real life newspaper tabloid sex scandals like the Peaches and Daddy Browning case which made headlines in 1926; ten years later an entire series of bibles by one unknown artist obscenely lampooned Mrs. Wallis Simpson and the King of England. By far the most popular celebrity character was Mae West, but virtually every major Hollywood star of the era was featured, obscenely and libelously, in the Tijuana bibles. A popular comic strip character like Tillie or Blondie might appear in as many as 40 different eight-pagers drawn by ten different artists. An entire series of ten bibles drawn by Mr. Prolific was based on famous gangsters: Legs Diamond, Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly were featured; while the artist working under the alias "Elmer Zilch" drew a set of eight comics about famous boxers like Jack Dempsey. Another set of ten bibles drawn by Prolific featured radio stars including Joe Penner and Kate Smith. Blackjack drew a set of ten comics using characters from Snow White, with each of the seven dwarfs starring in his own X-rated title. The ten book series format was dictated by the limitations of the printing equipment used to print the bibles, which made it convenient to print a set of ten titles at a time, side by side on a large sheet which was then cut into strips, collated, folded and stapled. Typically a new set of ten would be issued every couple of months, all drawn by the same artist, featuring ten different cartoon characters or celebrities. For several months in 1935 Elmer Zilch and his publishers experimented with a ten-page format, issued in sets of eight with two-tone covers. Each panel in this series was surrounded by an intricate engraved arabesque border, hence the series became known to collectors as the "Ornate Borders" series. Only 42 bibles are thought by collectors to have been issued in this style, and most of them were soon being reprinted in truncated 8-page form. In addition to comic strip characters and celebrities, many bibles featured nameless stock characters like cab drivers, firemen, traveling salesmen (and farmer's daughters), icemen, maids, and the like. 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. To many collectors this series was the epitome of the Tijuana bible genre; during the Senate racket investigations of the 1950s a New York businessman named Abe Rubin was even 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 Fuller Brush man stories made a very weak stab at continuity (e.g. "The following week I was sent to Tallahassee" or somesuch words at the commencement of each installment), but each 8-panel story was self-contained. 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tijuana bible」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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