Vintage Pulp | Jan 26 2018 |
Sokol's racy cartoons gave Playboy a touch of—well, maybe class isn't the word—but something.
It's nice to have friends that like Pulp Intl. We had a visitor not long ago who brought us some pages he'd clipped from old Playboy magazines. It was an unsolicited and much appreciated gift. This friend is an animator in Hollywood, so he has a keen interest in the work of British cartoonist Erich Sokol, who was one of the best visual humorists regularly published in Playboy. Sokol's mission was simple—try to be artful and funny, while discussing sex in an entertaining way. His style is distinct—curvaceous women with wide, archer's bow mouths, men with long noses and often baffled expressions, and, compared to other cartoonists, deep dimensionality and color in the backgrounds.
Sokol was a wit off the page as well. Friends and acquaintances describe him as a bigtime partier who dreamt up much of his material while drinking in bars. As with any vintage humor his gags are hit and miss today. After five decades that's no surprise. Time can be a humor killer—we made a quip earlier today and it was stale before we even finished it. In any case, when Sokol's humor falls flat it's still cute, at least as far as we're concerned. Our girlfriends might feel differently. Six of these cartoons are original scans, and we augmented the group with examples we found online. We also enlarged the text to make it more easily readable. Enjoy, and keep an eye out for more Sokol, because we plan to revisit him a bit later.
Sokol was a wit off the page as well. Friends and acquaintances describe him as a bigtime partier who dreamt up much of his material while drinking in bars. As with any vintage humor his gags are hit and miss today. After five decades that's no surprise. Time can be a humor killer—we made a quip earlier today and it was stale before we even finished it. In any case, when Sokol's humor falls flat it's still cute, at least as far as we're concerned. Our girlfriends might feel differently. Six of these cartoons are original scans, and we augmented the group with examples we found online. We also enlarged the text to make it more easily readable. Enjoy, and keep an eye out for more Sokol, because we plan to revisit him a bit later.