The longtime cartoon editor for Playboy Magazine, Michelle Urry, has died. This article tells more about her than I can, and I'd call your attention to the parts about how important she was to the field of gag cartooning. Ms. Urry (her last name was pronounced "your-e") was a stern taskmaster to some, but on her watch, Playboy was one of the two most important venues — The New Yorker being the other — for cartoonists who wanted to draw and sell panel cartoons. Other markets folded and new entries onto the newsstand eschewed that form…but Michelle continued to buy, as noted in the article, a million dollars worth of cartoons each year.
I only had a few brief encounters with Ms. Urry over the years. She would sometimes phone me with historical-type questions about comics and cartoonists, and twice I was summoned to her presence for meetings about maybe writing an ongoing strip for Playboy — once, after Harvey Kurtzman passed, concerning "Little Annie Fanny." It was easy to see that she approached her job with great dedication and no thought whatsoever that it was "only cartoons" and didn't matter. It did matter…to her. You may have heard that some men have claimed to read Playboy "only for the articles." That's a fib so they don't let on what they're really interested in. They read it for the cartoons.