Playboy's Alden Erikson Cartoons (1972)

Alden Erickson at one point in his career drew his cartoons in a tree house perched high among California's redwoods.
Currently he draws them in his kitchen, in the public library and in his car. The car seems to be his favorite. "I just drive out someplace really isolated," he says, "and go to work. I do some of my best stuff that way."
He does have a studio in his home, equipped with every convenience and creature comfort—drawing board, fancy lamps, platoons of pens and pencils, comfortable chairs, liquid refreshment, the works—but he's seldom there. He's usually parked somewhere, far from the madding crowd, sketch pad propped against steering wheel, engrossed in creating one of the many hilarious, emphatically Eriksonian cartoons that have enlivened PLAYBOY'S pages since 1957.
Erikson was born in Massachusetts, lived for a while in New York City, "but I couldn't stand those winters," so for the past decade or so has been residing in California, most recently in Mill Valley.
When he's not parked under a shade tree, car-tooning, he's restoring antique clocks. "Not the mechanism—the faces, the numbers, the old-fashioned ornamentation and scrollwork. I got started on this kick when I inherited a family heirloom, an old clock built by my great-great-grandfather. The beautiful decoration on the face was almost completely worn away; so I tried my hand at restoring it, while a mechanical-minded friend fixed the insides. We've been doing it with other antique clocks ever since, mainly as a hobby."
The only other creative person among his ancestors was a grandmother who painted,
played pretty good accordion and sculpted in metal, years before it was an "in" art medium. Alden, however, is the first professional artist on his family tree.
"I was always fascinated by cartoons," he says. "When I was a kid, I loved the comic strip Smoker Stover. I used to go around muttering all those nutty little catch phrases that were sprinkled in the background of the strip—remember FOO and NOTARY SOJAC and 1506 NIX NIX?
"When I was a little older, the first girls I began to notice were those great beauties in Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim and Terry and the Pirates. And I got hooked on the superhero comic books, too—Captain America, The Spirit, Submariner, The Human Torch and all those."
By the time he was 17, young Alden's interest in The Human Torch began to fade in favor of the cartoons of a man named Peter Arno. "His characters were very funny and, what's more, very sophisticated and Park Avenue. Eventually I made my way to New York and discovered Park Avenue for myself. Sure enough, there were the Arno dowagers, doormen, chorus girls and sugar daddies, just like the ones in his cartoons, but I never got to know them personally, because I couldn't afford the neighborhood. Instead, I found a furnished room on Amsterdam Avenue. The people in that neighborhood were definitely not Arno characters. They were more like the scruffy, scroungy, out-at-elbow people Jack Davis was drawing for Mad."
Clearing a path through his Mad-type neighbors, Erikson began attending classes a few blocks away at the Art Students League. "The league was a neat place, because if you didn't like your teacher, you could change classes at the end of the month. One month I'd study primitive sculpture, and then I'd switch to maybe New England–type watercolors or possibly abstract painting, which was very big then. Took a stab at life drawing, hand-lettering, portrait painting, illustration and even fashion drawing, where I met a lot of pretty girls."
But the time came when he had to go to work, and he found himself doing technical drawing: "pictures of gears, capacitors, vacuum tubes, spark plugs and electrical circuits, in a place on Forty-fifth Street. When things got slow, I'd while away the time drawing funny pictures. One day someone suggested I show some of the funny pictures to the cartoon editor of the Saturday Evening Post, just around the corner on Fifth Avenue. I did, the editor bought one, and suddenly there I was—a professional cartoonist."
Sales to Harper's, Saturday Review and other publications followed, "and then one day I discovered PLAYBOY-or PLAYBOY discovered me."
The freedom of the cartoonist's life is not unappreciated by Erikson—the flexible hours, the good money, the privilege of making a living doing something he loves—and yet these advantages do not blind him to the hard realities of cartooning in the Seventies. "When I was a kid, there were dozens of magazines wide open for cartoons. But now, with so many magazines folding, like Look, and others dropping cartoons altogether, like Esquire, there just aren't that many first-rate markets. That's why PLAYBOY is so important, not only to cartoonists but to all those millions of people who love to laugh at cartoons. It's one of the few remaining major showcases for the country's top talent."
Erikson's characters bear little resemblance to his old Mad-type neighbors on Amsterdam Avenue. They're more like the people he admired as a youth in the work of Peter Arno and his other idol, Gardner Rea. The men are usually urban and smartly dressed; the women are equally urban but often undressed. These dauntless darlings wear uniformly optimistic, self-contained expressions on their pert faces (and perter bosoms), whether they are jumping nude through a hypnotist's hoop, standing nude on a commuter-train platform or sitting nude at a card table playing strip poker. Nothing seems to faze the Erikson girl very much-although she may show some slight measure of surprise when the mailman, forgetting his appointed rounds, seizes her in a passionate embrace, and she may be just a jot nonplussed when her boyfriend has his name tattooed on her derriere in lieu of an engagement ring. Sex kinks are powerless to dismay her; a lurid scene of seaside sadomasochism rates only a raised eyebrow as "one of the most exclusive beach clubs in the Caribbean," and a shapely shopper can brightly request of a salesclerk in a shoe store, "Something weird in a high-heeled pump. I'm going out with a foot fetishist."
We can't pinpoint with any degree of precision which of the cartoons in this book were created in the tree house, the kitchen, the public library or the car. Where they were really created was in the head of Alden Erikson—a very wild place, indeed.
—the editors of PLAYBOY