As if there aren't already enough reasons to admire Hugh Hefner for all he has accomplished in his life, now comes this. He's a big geek who wanted to be a comic book artist as a kid.
In an interview with Geoff Boucher for the LA Times (the same guy who writes the great Hero Complex blog), Hefner revealed that Playboy magazine, to a degree, began as a comic book that he drew for his friends as a kid when he was growing up.
"I was most interested in writing and cartooning," he told me as we sat in his downstairs library near a bare-breasted statue of Barbi Benton. "I wrote short stories and lots of mysteries and horror stories and did comic books in grade school and high school. I actually started a comic-book autobiography in high school called ‘School Daze,’ about the adventures of my friends and myself. I then began adding clippings and photographs too. It eventually became like a scrapbook. I went directly out of high school into the Army; it was during World War II, and I continued that."
That scrapbook mentality -- collecting cartoons, photographs and lifestyle items in one spot -- was an essential concept for Hefner's future career. He just added lots of glossy pictures of buxom women in the nude.
"The comic book was a way of creating your own world and being center stage. And only years later did I realize that when I started the magazine, and the way I used the magazine in my life, it had a direct parallel to what I did in high school. The comic book became the scrapbook that I have continued then throughout my life and now has over 2,000 volumes."
The article goes on to discuss other topics such as Hefner's love of movies, but I figured I'd share this interesting tidbit about a man who is already one of my idols. Knowing he was a comic geek as a kid (sort of) just makes me like him even more.
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