Tuesday, October 17, 2006  
Michelle Urry, R.I.P.

:: Posted by Bryan @ 10/17/2006 05:43:00 AM
Editor a Significant Force in Post-War Cartooning
by Bryan Munn

Michelle Urry, longtime cartoon editor at Playboy Magazine, has died of cancer in New York.

Raised in Winnipeg, Urry (born Michelle Kaplan in 1939) was an early fan of comic art. According to a 1995 New York Times interview, "What no one knew at the time was that as a kid I had the biggest comic book collection of any girl I knew, just stacks and stacks of Wonder Woman and other characters. I expected to grow up to wear gold bracelts and fly. [...] I was a snob even then --a comic that wasn't well drawn didn't interest me. But give me a well-drawn comic with a good story and I was hooked."

She later moved to the U.S., was educated at UCLA and ran a fashion design business in Los Angeles before moving to Chicago in search of employment. Hired as a typist at Playboy in 1965, she was soon noticed by publisher Hugh Hefner and promoted to assistant cartoon editor and then to cartoon editor. For 40-odd years it was Urry's job to sift through thousands of submissions to Playboy on a monthly basis before presenting the cream of the crop to Hefner for his seal of approval. In this way, Urry became one of the most prominent and respected gag cartoon editors in the field, helping to discover and develop the careers of many successful cartoonists, including B. Kliban, Howard Cruse, Bill Plympton, Harvey Kurtzman, Jules Feiffer, Arnold Roth, Shel Silverstein, Gahan Wilson, and Chris Brown, who has called Urry "one of the greatest comics editors ever." In a 1970 article on humour for the Chicago Tribune, Urry tried to explain the appeal of the cartoons she published, many of which targetted women and sexual politics: "The rise in sexual and erotic humor is often viewed with alarm but it may, in fact, indicate a generally healthier society. You cannot laugh at anything unless you have mastered your anxieties about it, and the airing of these previously forbidden areas with more acceptance by society means that they are no longer so frightening. In order to laugh at a cartoon, for instance, one must be able to perceive the hidden hostility and be stimulated by it, but the cartoonist has to make it clever enough so that you don't feel guilty because you identify with it."

Along with The New Yorker, Playboy remains the most important market for freelance panel cartoonists. On the continued prominence of cartoons in Playboy (from that same NYT interview): "Mr. Hefner, because he loves cartoons so much, was the one who decided that cartoons would be an important part of the magazine, and he created a budget for them. I started off at Playboy being wildly spoiled. Now everyone fights for space --photgraphers, writers, advertising reps, the fashion department. I think this is true of all magazines. Increasingly, cartoons are viewed as expendable, they're just fillers."

Urry, who once claimed she bought "approximately a million dollars worth of cartoons a year" for Hefner, also worked as a consultant for other magazines and edited several collections of Playboy cartoons over the years. She often shared her experiences with comics fans and young cartoonists at many conventions and forums and was an articulate writer and critic of the artform (she contributed an essay on Jack Cole to the third volume of DC's Plastic Man archives).

In the late-1960s Urry was briefly married to Jack Altman before marrying the sculptor Steven Urry (d.1993), with whom she had a son, Caleb. She later married screenwriter Alan R. Trustman, with whom she lived in New York and Sag Harbor.

More:
Google's cache of cartoonist Skip Williamson's reminiscence of his time working with Urry at Playboy.

(with files contributed by Jeet Heer)

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