Issue Twenty Four: The Birds and the Bees
Weekly Playboy (プレーボーイ) is a Japanese men’s magazine founded in 1966 by Tokyo-based publisher Shueisha. The magazine, which is still being printed today, includes news articles, comics, short fiction, fashion editorials and, of course, nude photos. Despite the Playboy name, the publication actually has no affiliation with American Playboy outside their shared focus on the female form—another magazine, Monthly Playboy, which ran from 1975-2009, instead held the honor of being the approved Japanese translation.
Many of the early issues of Weekly Playboy feature exceptionally designed covers (some are even a bit reminiscent of Polish publication Ty I Ja, subject of a prior issue), but I have a particular fascination with the covers from the first three years of the magazine, which exclusively feature cartoon animals made from nudes—sometimes a result of collage, other times made through DIY costumes. The results, no matter their original erotic intent, are playful, weird, and altogether uncanny.
After being rightfully bullied by curator and archivist Stephen Coles for not providing image credits in my newsletters, from now on I'll be adding source links at the bottom of each issue! Sometimes images are scans from my own collection, which I'll note as well when that's the case. To save myself a bit of time—this is an unpaid newsletter done in my "free time" after all—for now I'll just be providing the parent links for the whole issue rather than linking out every image to its exact location source (sorry Stephen).
This issue's featured archive is The Vintage Ad Browser, a collection of over 100,000 advertisements from as far back as 1790. Like so many of my favorite archives, the website's interface is very stripped back and focused only on the ephemera itself—which is meticulously sorted by year and topic. Some particular collections of note are 1980s sports, 1920s perfume, and 1970s alcohol.
In other news: I wrote another piece for AIGA last month about the about the rise of in-line symbols and faux rebuses. My love of this trend is obviously deeply rooted in the AIM away messages / emoji-laden chain texts of my youth.