A Tijuana Primer

Comic book historians and Watchmen readers will recognize the term "Tijuana Bible" as the title ascribed to some now infamous underground comics of the Mid-20th Century. Daniel Robert Epstein has a fantastic interview just posted on Suicidegirls.com with reknowned photographer and Tijuana Bible afficionado Bob Adelman, who has just published a new edition of his book Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s, now including an introduction by Art Spiegelman.

I saw an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer and he told me that there was a trademark issue but that it was a no-brainer. The way in which trademarks are enforced is by getting an injunction preventing you from publishing something which would be damaging. But since this had already been published 60 years ago the burden would be on the trademark holder to prove how he had been damaged. I thought that was really smart so I said to myself “Now I had finally met a smart lawyer.” When Simon & Schuster heard that they were fine with it. They only asked that we get Art Spiegelman to do an introduction to make it kosher.

I enjoyed the bibles because these were the sex manuals of my youth but Art Spiegelman was very much influenced by them as was Mad Magazine, R. Crumb and many of the underground comics of the 60’s. The 30’s and 40’s comics were very polite so the surrealism of putting sex into comics was revolutionary. The next generation brought a whole satiric, ironic and sexual thrust to them. As part of comic book history they are important because many people believe they may be the first comic books. Some of them were even 32 pages long like modern comics. The drawing style was also more relaxed and freer which appealed to the 60’s comic artists.

If you've ever wanted an inside look at the publishing processes behind these books, Adelman offers some incredible details about legal loopholes and historical trivia about these zany books.