The distncitive Playboy “bunny” logo – one of the most iconic corporate brand logos. created by art director Art Paul for the second issue as an endnote, but adopted as the official logo and appearing ever since. It is one of the most distinctive recurring features of the magazine – a running gag (or puzzle) was that the logo always featured somewhere in the magazine cover art or photograph, usually hidden (fair use)

(20) PLAYBOY

You should have seen this one coming, as I like to reserve my final twentieth special mention for the kinky (or kinkier) entry from the subject matter.

It also dovetails nicely with my first special mention for Mad Magazine. As with Mad Magazine, Playboy was hereditary for me – albeit unsurprisingly from my father rather than my mother for Magazine. As with Mad Magazine, I was raised on Playboy – unofficially of course, from covertly raiding my father’s impressively comprehensive Playboy collection. And yes, like Mad Magazine, Playboy was a huge influence on me. If you peel back the layers of my messy psyche, you’ll find Playboy lodged deep throughout it, perhaps even most of it – and definitely most of my id.

But I’ll have you know that, as the trope goes – although usually mocked as a transparent alibi or excuse – I did indeed “read it for the articles”. Now I’m not going to equivocate – obviously as the archetypal (and perpetually) adolescent male, I looked at it for its signature nude photography and models, those proverbial Playboy bunnies, Playmates and centerfolds. But AFTER I did that, I did indeed read it for its articles – and even more so, its comics. And those comics also lodged deep in my psyche.

“Playboy founder Hugh Hefner…was a lifelong admirer of comics and went out of his way to not only feature many comics in the pages of Playboy for over 50 years, but he also put his money where his mouth was in his support of comic artists, as the rates he paid were unheard of at the time”. And as noted by Comic Book Resources’ tribute to Hefner after his death, almost assuredly, the reason that Hefner was so into comics was that he, himself, was a comic book artist when he was growing up. While Hefner was in high school, he kept a comic book diary about his life – and it is not too hard to see the origin of Playboy in that. And upon founding Playboy, Hefner was intent on heavily featuring comics within the magazine

Liberally spread through each magazine in its heyday – and liberally paid as well – were cartoons or comics from some of the best and brightest contemporary cartoonists – “hip subversives and sly revolutionaries all, Playboy’s artists have continually proffered a sophisticated brand of humor sorely missing in other men s magazines…offering insightful commentary on topics from the sexual revolution to relationships, money, and politics”.

Perhaps the archetypal subject for Playboy cartoons (or at least that subject I remember more than any other) was the recurring image of the husband walking in on the adulterous wife (and vice versa although less so) in flagrante delicto – with the punchline as the implausible excuse being offered up by the suitor. “Now you grab the choking victim like this…”, in perhaps the most implausible demonstration of the Heimlich Maneuver ever.

And then you have some particular comics within Playboy, such as “Little Annie Fanny”, by none other than Mad Magazine’s Harvey Kurtzman – a satire of sexual mores in contemporary American society and parody of Little Orphan Annie, if the latter was a buxom blonde who innocently found herself nude in every episode.

A personal favorite and my featured image, the femlin – or female gremlin, a spritely but statuesque female figure clad only in black stockings, long gloves and heels which would cavort through Playboy’s Party Jokes (within the centerfold). Created by artist Leroy Neiman and depicted essentially as black and white line drawings in mischievous poses, with perhaps the archetypal pose curled up provocatively inside a wine glass (replicated or replicating real-life cover models)

And arguably also Playboy’s most iconic image that I’ve used as my feature image, its jauntily stylized silhouetted bow-tied rabbit logo – with a running joke of featuring it on every cover, generally hiding it somewhere.

Playboy is also representative of er0tic comics in general – a surprisingly prolific subject which could well be the subject of its own top ten. However, I have to at least mention Playboy’s rival magazine Penthouse and its comic strips here – particularly “O Wicked Wanda!” about the titular globe-trotting (and ultimately time-travelling) dominatrix heroine. My preference however was its successor “Sweet Chastity” – essentially a retold Frankenstein, if Frankenstein’s monster was a buxom pink-haired beauty.