WILLIAM STEIG.(Obituary)(The Talk of the Town)

William Steig, a contributor to this magazine since 1930, died the other day at the age of ninety-five, but contrived to leave a lasting impression of himself as a boy bursting with ideas and promise. His first cartoons here called upon his beginnings in the Bronx--he was the son of socialist immigrants; his father was a housepainter--and found comedy in families living in cramped apartments with kids underfoot and a trickle of air or springtime coming in over the fire escape. "Come home early or I'll kick you in the pants," a large mom warns her small departing Boy Scout. The scenes were gentle, but adults often emerged as the heavies--"How's your fat little boyfriend?" a smirking grandpa asks an eight-year-old girl. Steig's first great successes in the magazine were the running series "Small Fry" and "Dreams of Glory," which presented stubby, snub-nosed kids without grownups, busy with street life or at the beach, fighting Comanches or taking a bath or smoking an illicit Egyptian Deity cigarette. There were labelling tag lines but fewer captions; the joy in the drawing had become more important than the jokes. The Steig ragamuffins, by the way, provided useful antimatter to Peter Arno's svelte couples in evening clothes and Helen Hokinson's ladies'-club dowagers, which had established their place in the magazine some years prior.

Steig kept changing. A period of symbolic, heavily inked depictions of the human condition produced book collections with dire titles--"The Lonely Ones," "Ruminations"--but his line soon began to grow lighter and amazingly free. On a tip from his son Jeremy, a jazz flautist, in the sixties, he had stopped working from sketches and would wait, pen in hand at his drawing board, to act on whatever idea or style came next. Satyrs and brooding lions, rooster painters, cats strumming mandolins, clowns on horseback, graying fauns, naked damosels regarded by friars or foxes soon crowded these pages. "Please! Not today!" pleads a tired dragon to still another knight. But Steig was never content simply with the long-ago or the sweetly fantastic. In a drawing that ran a couple of years ago, a cat and a dog sit at opposite ends of a Central Park bench, each dressed in a suit and tie. The hound is staring mysteriously and angrily into the middle distance, while the cat regards him out of the corner of his eye, clearly thinking, Uh-oh, what's with this guy?: New York.

Steig's covers, meantime, had become more frequent and less cautious, bursting with yellows, pale greens, and electric mauves: a small girl's birthday, almost out of Bonnard; five Rothko-purple monster masks springing out of a jack-in-the-box. Touching everyone and influencing none, he was beyond imitation. Only Saul Steinberg, perhaps, produced so many absolute surprises in these pages, or in such volume: a hundred and twenty-one covers and sixteen hundred and seventy-six drawings. Another hundred-odd ...