{"id":116210,"date":"2017-09-28T15:02:42","date_gmt":"2017-09-28T19:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=116210"},"modified":"2017-09-28T16:01:04","modified_gmt":"2017-09-28T20:01:04","slug":"i-read-playboy-for-the-comix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/28\/i-read-playboy-for-the-comix\/","title":{"rendered":"I Read Playboy <\/em> for the Comix"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Art Spiegelman for Playboy, ca. 1981<\/p><\/div>\n

In the late seventies\u00a0and early eighties,\u00a0I was a proud contributor to Playboy Funnies<\/em>, an ongoing section in Playboy<\/em> that tried to recuperate underground comix: they sanitized the movement while also acknowledging it. Hefner had once aspired to become a cartoonist and had an eye for the form. Tho as he once said in an interview\u2014I\u2019m paraphrasing\u2014\u201cI see how cartoonists live and how I live and I have no regrets.\u201d<\/p>\n

I first convinced my clueless refugee parents to subscribe to the magazine when I was fourteen\u2014\u201cso I could study the cartoons.\u201d A couple years later my father and I had a \u201cheart to heart\u201d talk. He told me I\u2019d have to take the centerfolds off my wall since my mother was too embarrassed to come in and clean my room.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The zeitgeist has changed many times since then, and current gender and identity politics may make it hard to remember that Hefner was a force for good\u2014consistently defending progressive causes, a champion of the First Amendment, secular values, gay rights, and women\u2019s freedom of choice, for example, while publishing in-depth interviews with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin as well as conversations with and fiction by Vladimir Nabokov and Norman Mailer (pax, Paris Review<\/em>). He was a bit thrown by feminism, but his magazine was in many ways a precondition of the counterculture. Yes, he had golden plumbing fixtures a generation before our president, but he had better words and he was a hell of a lot smarter.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Art Spiegelman for Playboy<\/em>, ca.\u00a01978.<\/p><\/div>\n

I did an ongoing series called Ed Head<\/em>. I was amused at doing a strip about a character with no body for a magazine that celebrated them\u2026<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Art Spiegelman for Playboy, <\/em> circa 1979<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the late seventies\u00a0and early eighties,\u00a0I was a proud contributor to Playboy Funnies, an ongoing section in Playboy that tried to recuperate underground comix: they sanitized the movement while also acknowledging it. Hefner had once aspired to become a cartoonist and had an eye for the form. Tho as he once said in an interview\u2014I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[11515,131,30808,17379,28373,14726,881,10536,3306,1437,16667,30807,967,30809],"class_list":["post-116210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-cartooning","tag-comics","tag-comix","tag-counterculture","tag-gay-rights","tag-hugh-hefner","tag-james-baldwin","tag-malcolm-x","tag-martin-luther-king","tag-norman-mailer","tag-playboy","tag-playboy-funnies","tag-vladimir-nabokov","tag-womens-health"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nI Read \u2018Playboy\u2019 for the Comix<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Art Spiegelman was a proud contributor to \u2018Playboy Funnies,\u2019 which attempted to recuperate underground comix.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" 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