The last Playboy Christmas postings, for this year

Happy Holidays. That's all from the winter Playboys for this year. December 1962
Eldon Dedini

December 1963
Claude Smith

December 1965
Dedini, John Dempsey

Alden Erikson, Dink Siegel, Gahan Wilson

December 1961

Another Little Annie Fanny story by Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, and Russ Heath. If you ever get to meet the latter, he will tell you how working on this strip ended up with his living in the Playboy mansion.

Cartoons of Playboy Past

Here's one of the very early Little Annie Fannys from before they started using assistants.

Their annual Christmas cards for the December 1963 issue. Obviously published before November 22, they had no idea what would happen then, and according to the Little Annie Fanny collection, excised all JFK material for their next issue at the last minute. As a bonus, the Kennedys are drawn by the great Jack Davis.

Also cards by Phil Interlandi, Gahan Wilson, Shel Silverstein, and Eldon Dedini.

From that same issue, the best of their cartoons from past issues up to that point. Also from the December 1963 issue.

On this page are John Dempsey, Erich Sokol, Phil Interlandi, and Bill Murphy

Phil Interlandi, Eldon Dedini, and E. Simms Campbell. I believe I posted the latter two before.

Charles Elmer Martin, John Dempsey, Dedini, and Claude Smith

Interlandi, Dempsey, Sid Harris, and Sokol

Interlandi, two by Murphy, and Dempsey. Everyone seems to be heterosexual at the nudist colony, but then again, this was before the protests at Stonewall changed everything.

Not sure who the upper left cartoonist is. The rest are Dempsey, Interlandi (again pre-Stonewall), and Gahan Wilson

Lost Elder?

Here's something Devlin Thompson of Athens, GA sent me. Now it's bothering me as well. Here's what he said:

"I've just gotten around to scanning a few of the illustrations from Telephone Almanac For 1962, a slightly-smaller-than comic-book size two-color booklet produced by Bell Telephone. While I've never run across any mention of it anywhere, I'm pretty sure that (with the exception of two or three illos) it's entirely illustrated by Will Elder... and pretty tight stuff, comparable to his Coronet pieces. I've attached some fairly hi-res scans as illustration. So...what say you? Am I engaged in wishful thinking, or what?"

Maybe someone here might know.

POW 2, 2 of 4

The things that are cut off on these scans were actually cut off my own copy of the magazine.









The initials "W.E." probably stand for Will Elder. A lot of artists like him, Jack Kirby, Russ Heath, and others you wouldn't expect contributed to magazines like this at one time or another. It's weird to see work by Elder without any 'chicken fat', probably because this is one of the few things he did without Harvey Kurtzman, who was the one who brought that out.