 Not all were as impressed . Noting that Kurtzman was financially strapped before making his living for twenty @-@ six years from Playboy , historian Paul Buhle wrote : " The strip had many brilliant early moments , but went downhill as the writer and artist bent to editor Hugh Hefner 's demands for as much titillation as possible . " Cartoonist Art Spiegelman said that Little Annie Fanny devolved from the more interesting Goodman Beaver . Underground cartoonist Robert Crumb , whose career Kurtzman helped launch , scorned Playboy and Annie . Monty Python 's Terry Gilliam , the former assistant editor of Help ! , said that Little Annie Fanny was not as sharp as Kurtzman 's earlier work : " technically brilliant but ... slightly compromised . " Art agent and publisher Denis Kitchen , who handles Kurtzman and Eisner 's estates , said that " most Kurtzman devotees would not consider Little Annie Fanny genius work ... [ and ] some would argue the opposite : that it was genius diluted or degraded " . Kitchen placed the onus on Kurtzman 's employer Hefner , who " was often a punctilious taskmaster with a heavy red pen who often had very different ideas about what was funny or satiric " and insisted that each strip " had to include Annie disrobing " . Beauchamp agreed : " Unfortunately , Hefner was notorious for his heavy editorial hand . " Duncan and Smith also agreed , and wrote that " humor sometimes mixes awkwardly with the loaded topics of the era , and some have found Annie 's lack of character development and the requisite sexual hijinks an impediment to taking her seriously . " However , they repeated their respect : " The eternally innocent Annie performed admirably as a nonjudgmental witness to the changing tides of the sexual revolution . " 
