"Degenerate" "Art"!Tijuana Bibles were small, short erotic (okay, "dirty") comics produced in the USA from the 1930's to 1950's (with some "broadsheet" forerunners in the 1920's and a few odd "sequels" produced in later years). They were not known as "Tijuana Bibles" until almost the end of their life, most of the time they were known by various names including "bluesies", "eight-pagers", "Tillie & Mac books" etc. In the 50's northern Mexico was seen as a "freer" place, where uptight Americans could go to let off steam. They had much in common with today's Japanese Doujinshi, as they were almost always based on famous comic strips or celebrities of the time. Unlike Doujinshi, they were not sold openly, but traded under-the-counter at bars, pool halls, seedy cinemas and the like. Of course, today in the west obscenity laws wouldn't censor them, but copyright would! But Japan (in fact, Asia) has always taken a more enlightened attitude to parody. Anyway, my own Tijuana Bibles are meant to have more in common with 1980's Italian movies than the originals. They are full of gore as well as porn, and they also form a coherent(ish) story, when all put together. I started to draw the first one years ago, but it looked kind of crappy, so I gave up. One day I'll get on with making them properly. They'll be A6 sized, and all printed on different-coloured papers. Maybe there will be an A5-sized big book of the whole series when they're done, too. Also, they are set in 2010, at the (retconned) time of the Genshiken novel, and set in the same universe! That also makes them a prequel to Fiasco. Around 2015 there was a small publisher on Facebook called something like "Vintage Sleaze", who published a book that promised to be the definitive guide to Tijuana Bibles. Then Donald Trump became Republican frontrunner, and they went absolutely mental. A lot of their fans supported free speech, and thus Trump, and they got their noses put extremely out of joint by this, closed their website and stopped selling the book. Does anybody have a copy they either want to sell me, or are willing to scan for me? Offers invited! |