The Playboy

The Playboy: A Comic Book
Cover of the first edition of The Playboy from Drawn and Quarterly
Creator	Chester Brown
Date	1992
Publisher	Drawn and Quarterly
Original publication
Published in	Yummy Fur
Issues	21–23
Dates of publication	June–December 1990

The Playboy is a graphic novel by Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown, serialized in 1990 in Brown's comic book Yummy Fur and collected in different revised book editions in 1992 and 2013. It deals with Brown's guilt and anxiety over his obsessive masturbation to Playboy Playmate models.

The story begins with Brown's first purchase of an issue of Playboy as a teenager. His obsessive masturbating gives him great guilt and anxiety, and out of fear of being caught he repeatedly rids himself of copies of the magazine, only to retrieve them later. His conflicting emotions follow him into adulthood until he purges them by revealing himself through his comics. The free, organic arrangement of odd-shaped panels of simple, expressive artwork contrasts with Brown's more detailed grid-like pages in his 1980s work, such as Ed the Happy Clown.

The Playboy forms part of Brown's early-1990s autobiographical period, and was the first book-length work he planned as a complete story. Brown conceived it as a longer work with what became his next graphic novel, I Never Liked You (1994), but found the larger story too complex to handle at once. The story has attracted praise for its revealing honesty and criticism from those who saw it as glorifying pornography. Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner wrote Brown to express concern over Brown's sexual anxieties in a post-sexual revolution world.

Chester Brown grew up in Châteauguay, a Montreal suburb with a large English-speaking minority; he does not speak French. He described himself as a "nerdy teenager" attracted to comic books from a young age. He sought a career drawing superhero comics, but was unsuccessful in finding work with Marvel or DC after graduating from high school. He moved to Toronto and discovered underground comix and the small-press community. He began to self-publish a minicomic in 1983 titled Yummy Fur.