The quality of the artwork varied widely. The artists, writers, and publishers of these booklets are generally unknown, as their publication was illegal, clandestine, and anonymous. Before World War II, almost all the stories were humorous and frequently were cartoon versions of well-known dirty jokes that had been making the rounds for decades.
Others made use of characters based on popular movie stars, and sports stars of the day, such as Mae West, Clark Gable and Joe Louis, sometimes with names thinly changed. Most Tijuana bibles were obscene parodies of popular newspaper comic strips of the day, such as ' Blondie', ' Barney Google', ' Moon Mullins', ' Popeye', ' Tillie the Toiler', ' The Katzenjammer Kids', ' Dick Tracy', ' Little Orphan Annie', and ' Bringing Up Father'. Their popularity peaked during the Great Depression era.
Tijuana bibles (also known as eight-pagers, Tillie-and-Mac books, Jiggs-and-Maggie books, jo-jo books, bluesies, blue-bibles, gray-backs, and two-by-fours) were palm-sized pornographic comic books produced in the United States from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Prolific', which borrowed the syndicated comic strip character Chris Crusty created by Bill Conselman and Charles Plumb for a topper strip which ran above their Ella Cinders Final page of the Tijuana bible Chris Crusty, drawn by 'Mr.
