As If I Needed Any More Reason To Admire Hugh Hefner

 

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.