Here are two of the milder pages from The Love Guide, a "Tijuana Bible" from the 1930s. Porn was, for the most part, illegal throughout early twentieth-century North America, cheaply produced, and clandestinely distributed. The "Tijuana Bibles"-- named for the sort of place where respectable Americans went to behave in ways they would not tolerate at home-- were genuinely underground comix which put characters, typically celebrity caricatures or comic-strip favorites, in sexual situations. The Love Guide credits its introduction and direction to Hollywood's Mae West, and features Popeye, Moon Mullins, Maggie and Jiggs, Tillie the Toiler, Major Hoople, Pete the Tramp, and other characters appropriated from the newspaper funnies in a crossover orgy. The story becomes explicit and grotesque, providing its readers with liberal doses of toilet humour, group sex, bestiality, and masturbation. For a detailed account and many reprints, see Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1997), by Bob Adelman, with an introductory essay by Art Speigelman and commentary by Richard Merkin. My own, brief overview of the phenomenon appears here

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