That's a Jesus alright. According to the Internet, Big J showed up in Playboy to honor the late Jose Saramago, a not-half-bad writer (he won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1998) who died in June. Saramago was from Portugal and if you didn't know, Spanish, Latin American and Portugese literature is just riddled with the Magical Realism and moreover the Catholicism, so Jesus tends to show up a lot, mainly just to freak you out. Saramago's work is no exception.
It's been a while since I've thumbed through a Playboy here in the US, but if this issue is any indication, Portuguese smut is a distinctly classy affair. Take for instance this riff on A Clockwork Orange, which for all I know could be from the same issue:
Nice, right? Although, now that I think about it, a sexy version of A Clockwork Orange might actually be pretty disturbing. Anyway compare that to this, a US cover:
And then, just for fun, look at this weird ass cover from Germany's Playboy, where there's some kind of Giant-lady / vehicular thing going on.
One last thing. Did you notice the nipple on the cover of Portuguese playboy? It doesn't seem fair that here in the USA, where Playboy was invented, you can't get away with that and yet in Europe -- the decaying museum of the western world that it is -- that's just fine. Goddamn Puritans.
P.S. Also, did you know "Portuguese" was spelled that way? With a "u"? I always thought it was spelled "Portugese", but I guess that spells [Por-tu-jeez], which is silly.
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