Hugh M. Hefner - Playboy: 50 Years: The Cartoons

Copyright 2004 by Playboy Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available. ISBN: 978-0-8118-3976-1 (print) ISBN: 978-1-4521-4465-8 (ebook fixed layout) ISBN: 978-1-4521-4448-1 (ebook reflowable) Designed by VSA Partners, Inc. Edited by Hugh M.Hefner.

Cartoon Editor: Michelle Urry. Assistant: Jennifer Thiele. Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books, 9050 Shaughnessy Street, Vancouver, British Columbia V6P 6E5. Chronicle Books LLC, 680 Second Street, San Francisco, California 94107, www.chroniclebooks.com The copyrights of the four images by Alberto Vargas are owned by Astrid Vargas Conte. All rights reserved. Alberto Vargas and Vargas are trademarks of Astrid Vargas Conte.

See page 367. INTRODUCTION 50 YEARS _____________________OF_____________________ CARTOONS

I once commented that without the centerfold, Playboy would be just another literary magazine. The same can be said for the cartoons. Playboy s visual humor has helped to define the magazineits lifestyle and its sexual politicsfor half a century. In the 1950s, Playboy was considered subversive by some. Hoover. Hoover.

In the sexual and political repression of the fifties, cartoonists were among the first to seek out the magazine as a place where humor of a more sophisticated nature was welcome. Mainstream magazines promoted the same sort of family oriented, Norman Rockwell, Saturday Evening Post togetherness as did early Father Knows Best , Leave It to Beaver television. But Playboy was a magazine for the young, urban male, and we marched to a different drummer. Some of our first cartoonists, like Jack Cole, the creator of the satirical superhero Plastic Man, came to us because comic book publishers were under attack as a corrupter of youth. In Seduction of the Innocent , psychiatrist Fredric Wertham had informed us that comic books were a major source of juvenile delinquency, that Wonder Woman was a lesbian ideal, and Batman and Robin were gay. To avoid government sanctions, publishers instituted a Comic Book Code that played havoc with the industry.

Magazine publishers were aware that the U.S. Post Office had attempted to put Esquire out of business in the 1940s by taking away its second-class mailing permit. The Feds objected, most especially, to the cartoons and the pinup art of Alberto Vargas. Esquire prevailed in the case that went to the Supreme Court, but the magazine dropped the cartoons just to be on the safe side, and Vargas found a new home at Playboy . So did Eldon Dedini and E. Simms Campbell, whose harem girls were, once again, permitted to appear topless.

The magazine became a playground for genius. Shel Silverstein and Jules Feiffer came on board, along with Phil Interlandi, John Dempsey, and Gahan Wilson. The humorists in Playboy were hip subversives, sly revolutionaries who poked fun at the prevailing hypocrisies of the time. Long before I started writing The Playboy Philosophy, the magazines cartoonists were satirizing the sanitized status quo.You did get a sense that something was happening, Feiffer said. That the laughter was a laughter of real humor, but also of defiance, that there was anger here. It wasnt just about being funny.

It was about being true. I think that in those years, certainly, whoever you hit was an appropriate target, because they were all lying to us. They all represented authority, with very repressive social and political agendas. So whether it was your parents, your teacher, the police, or the president, there was no confusion about targets. They were all the enemy.... The rules of society were so cynical that anybody pointing out the obvious was considered the cynic instead.

When Alfred Kinsey dared to suggest, in statistical detail no less, that women were as sexually active as men, society attempted to kill the messenger, while Playboy embraced the reality, poking fun at the hypocrisy of our puritan pretensions. Playboy fueled the sexual revolution of the sixties, and our cartoonists supplied the spark. I cannot begin to convey the personal pleasure I have had in revisiting a full half century of Playboy s illustrated humor, and choosing, with the able assistance of cartoon editor Michelle Urry, the rich, pop-culture, decade-defining work collected in this volume. Much has changed. Images by Alberto Vargas that once troubled the Post Office now hang in museums, thanks to the efforts of Astrid Vargas Conte, the artists niece.