It is surely no accident that illicit pornographic comic books, popularly known as Tijuana Bibles, thrived during the heyday of media censorship in modern America, roughly the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s. In the early decades of the century, movies, comic strips, and pulp magazines all had ample room for the naughty and risque, but by the 1920s the pressures of social respectability were increasingly hemming in popular culture. The acceptance of the stringent Hays Code by Hollywood in 1934 was a significant turning point in this larger trend. Like girlie magazines and stag movies, Tijuana Bibles represented an escape from the puritanism of mainstream culture. As the cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, creator of Mad magazine, once noted, "The obvious repression of sexual fantasy in [mainstream comic strips] brought its release in the little dirty books, or Tijuana Bibles."

Almost as ephemeral as washroom graffiti, Tijuana Bibles...