Pages

Friday, November 9, 2007

Ho Ho Ho

I drove to the local smut shop today (amazingly enough, we have 3 such places in Muncie!) and picked up the December 2007 issue of Playboy. The magazine was sealed in plastic, as it's been for several years now.

A digression: Who here remembers when Playboy -- and Penthouse and even Hustler -- could be thumbed through openly and were't required to be sheathed in plastic, in a sort of giant magazine condom? Also, who here remembers when Playboy (and the other aforementioned magazines) could be purchased at the local convenience or drug store?

A further digression: When I was a college student in the early 1980s, I worked at a 7-11 in San Francisco. We had to keep the Playboys and Penthouses behind the counter in a special rack that showed the magazine's name, but covered the "naughty bits" -- not that the covers of Playboy have every really been terribly "naughty."

Obviously this was the first step on the long road to keep (evil) pictures of nekkid women out of the hands of impressionable children.

So now we have Hugh Hefner's venerable old magzine safety-sealed, hidden away in "Adult" sex shops, while any kid with an Internet connection can find an endless sea of cyber porn, much of which leaves even me -- an avid enthusiast of erotica -- aghast.

Anyway, back to the point of this post: My Playboy cartoon is in the December issue. Yay!

If you want to see the nekkid girls, you'll have to track down your own copy at the local smut shop.

5 comments:

Scott Cummings said...

Congrats, Scott!

You know ... I've never submitted to a magazine before. I remember looking into it, years ago, and thinking that you had to get submission guidelines from every individual magazine and the guidelines for all of them were wildly different. Of course, I was young and impatient so I'm sure that's not true. How many cartoons were in the packet you sent Playboy? Do you have a standard submission format for all of them?

Scott Nickel said...

Thanks, Scott!

Magazine cartooning is pretty daunting...lots of rejection.

The most important thing is to get a contact name. I'm not sure guidelines are all that crucial.

I generally tailor the material I send to the publication. I've submitted to Playboy, Nickelodeon, Mad, all of which I’ve sold to; and Readers Digest, New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post, markets I've yet to crack.

All in all, I have much better success with greeting card companies.

Gary Fields said...

scott,
been enjoying your blog for a while. congrats on the pb sale. have you sold to them before? i've been doing gags for nickelodeon for years and it's my only foray into the gag market. my background had always been more comic book stuff. i've apprehensive about mag gags because of the speculation with sales and keeping track of batches. you also mention sales to greeting cards. are you submitting verse and art? any info you can share on these 2 markets would be greatly appreciated.
on a side note, i picked up some of the graphic novels you wrote from stone arch. great stuff!!
best,
gary

richardcthompson said...

Ha! Good one, Scott.

And remember when you could get a Slurpee at the local smut shop?

Scott Nickel said...

I remember going into a barber shop with my dad and seeing Playboy there.

As a precocious young man, I appreciated the proprietor’s forward thinking.