An Orgy Of Playboy's Dedini

For over 45 years, Eldon Dedini has been one of Playboy's most recognizable full-page gag cartoonists. With a masterful watercolor technique that burlesques a broad range of subjects—from East and West Coast urban and suburban adult-hipster to classical Japanese erotic prints—Dedini's most personal cartoons rely on mythology and legend, evoking a bucolic sexually liberated paradise that leaves its reader lingering over the imagery long after the gag registers.

A lifelong Californian, Dedini cut his graphic teeth in his early twenties as an editorial cartoonist for the Salinas Morning Post. He studied drawing and painting for two years at L.A.'s Chouinard Institute until 1944, when Walt Disney Studios hired him as a story sketch artist. Refusing to end up as just another anonymous Disney drone, Dedini worked nights and weekends to develop his own style and sold dozens of cartoons to Esquire, which in 1946 offered him a four-year contract at twice his Disney salary. In 1950 Dedini moved to The New Yorker—where he is still a contributor—and finally to Playboy in 1959.

An Orgy of Playboy's Eldon Dedini is the first retrospective collection of his work and gathers in one volume the most sophisticated, elegant—and funny—gag panels of the past six decades.