| abstract | - Roger Sabin traces the history of adult comics back to the political cartoons published in broadsheets since the 19th century. In 1930's, there were clandestinely produced tijuana bibles – rectangular, eight page pamphlets with black printing on cheap white paper. The artwork ranged from excellent to utterly crude and was sometimes also racist (Blacks were caricatured with huge lips and extruding eyes). Their stories were explicit sexual escapades usually featuring well known cartoon characters, political figures or movie stars (used without permission). Sold under the counter in places like tobacco stores and burlesque houses, millions of the tijuana bibles were sold at the height of their popularity in the 1930s. They went into a steep decline after World War II and by the mid-1950s only a small trickle of new product was still appearing on the market, mainly in the form of cheaply printed, poorly drawn and tasteless little eight pagers which sold for 10 cents each in run down candy stores, gas stations, and schoolyards, circulating mainly among delinquent teenagers. Starting in 1932, Norman Pett drew a strip called Jane for the British Daily Mirror newspaper. The heroine would often find herself in awkward situations where she would lose her clothing for one reason or another. The strip was written to some extent for a military audience to boost the morale of troops away from home. Winston Churchill said that Jane was Britain's "secret weapon". In the United States, Milton Caniff started producing the strip Male Call in 1943, and Bill Ward came out with Torchy in 1944 about similar risque heroines. In the 1950s Irving Klaw published a line of underground fetish and bondage comics by artists like Eric Stanton, John Willie, and Gene Bilbrew. These never achieved widespread popularity but were kept in print for many years, sold through Klaw's mail order catalog to the same customers who bought his bondage photographs of Bettie Page. Not quite obscene enough to warrant prosecution, they skirted the limits of legality by avoiding full frontal nudity in their depictions.
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