Tagged: Mike Gold

I’ve been gallivanting across this fine country again like the high society bon vivant that I am, so I was a little late in scoring my family’s big box o’ comics. It was even heavier than usual, despite the fact that my wife and daughter are both big-time comics fans. I figure it was about four and one-half pounds heavier. That’s because Playboy Cover to Cover – The 50s, finally arrived. It was released as a Christmas item last November, no doubt under the belief that it would make for an excellent stocking stuffer should King Kong become a cross-dresser.

If you ask founder / publisher / editor Hugh Hefner, he’ll give you the impression he single-handedly invented the sexual revolution back in 1954. That’s okay; he’ll also give you the impression he has foursomes with The Girls Next Door. Whereas I think the creation of the birth control pill and the resultant sexual empowerment of women had a lot more to do with it than Hugh, he did take a lot of risk and paid some heavy dues. Remember, until 1965 laws prohibiting the distribution of information about contraception, and in some cases even the possession of contraception, were still on the books – and not just in the bible belt states. Connecticut was the last to fall. People still went to jail for publishing, owning or mailing stuff about sex.

From a sexual perspective, all Playboy’s success did was put some of the under-the-counter content out on the newsstand racks. By the time Penthouse and, later, Hustler came out Playboy was irrelevant from a pictorial point of view. Of course, later the Internets completely rendered Playboy magazine sexually impotent, as they supplied men the one thing any magazine could not: freedom from your own fist. No, sex is not the reason Playboy was hip.

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I was in Manhattan last week, joining Martha Thomases and Glenn Hauman for a ComicMix mini-staff meeting. We were at a nice little diner in Greenwich Village, which is always a pleasantly nostalgic experience. I had to meet my wife and daughter in Newark for the Devils / Islanders game; I, of course, am a Blackhawks fan but it’s always swell to see Martin Brodeur in action. 

I had a bit of time to get to the new stadium, so I took the E train down to the connecting PATH train to Newark. This happens at the World Trade Center station, and I wanted to go there.

Yep. The station’s still called “World Trade Center,” despite the fact that the World Trade Center (stop me if you heard this one) was blowed up on September 11, 2001. Sadly, the site is still a big ugly hole in the ground. The subway stations were in a deep structurally-protected basement and have been shorn up to allow tens of thousands of commuters to continue to get to work. Sadly – and to our national embarrassment – it is six and one-third years later and the World Trade Center is still a big hole in the ground.

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