Murder in the Heart, Ink in the Veins
April 5, 2026
Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies & Clowns: The Lost Art of William Steig (Abrams ComicArts 2011), is a charming collection of previously unpublished work by the beloved New Yorker artist and creator of Shrek. Steig died in 2007 at the age of 95, and the posthumous book is curated by his wife Jeanne Steig, who wrote miniature memoirs to introduce its sections. (The introduction is by Roz Chast and the afterword by Jules Feiffer.)
Jeanne Steig, also an artist and writer, does exactly what her husband presumably would have wanted: She is tender and proud but no Pollyanna about him. (“For Bill, one of your odder ducks,” says the dedication.)
“Bill was terrific company,” Jeanne writes. “He specialized in asking questions, which made his visitors adore him. That could be a problem, as Bill was not really crazy about visitors.”
“When we lived in the country, one of my many relatives came for a visit. She brought presents: fresh halvah, one of Bill’s favorite sweets, and other delightful gifts. She was good company. Bill got along nicely with her, but the day she departed was surely not one day too soon. No sooner did the door close behind her than Bill fell into a rage. My relatives [he said], those benighted bourgeois, ‘had nothing better to do with themselves than fly all over the world bringing presents.’ I then fell into a fit myself….”
Jeanne storms out with the intention of leaving him, but half an hour toward New York City starts laughing, turns around, and finds “Bill in his studio, just where I’d left him. He looked up, beaming [and] hadn’t realized I had left him. And I never bothered to do it again.”
William Steig, Jeanne says, was compelled to watch the Watergate hearings on TV in 1973. “What he loathed beyond anything was a corrupt politician. A generally peaceable man, Bill claimed that if he knew he was going to die in the next couple of days, he would murder the worst ones. And he practiced nightly, using the various techniques that appealed to him. Just before falling asleep, he’d go after one: I’d feel an elbow assailing my ribs and know he had fatally throttled, shot, or clobbered a senator. Now that the world was a cozier place, we could settle in for a good night’s rest and, presumably, peaceful dreams.”
“There was a dark side to Bill’s character,” Jeanne writes. “You can’t have a good look at human nature without an awareness of its defects, and there was nothing hypocritical about Bill.”
Every morning he would read The New York Times and shake his head at the headlines. “”Yep,’ he’d say, ‘there’s the murder, there’s the corruption, there is the bigotry, and there’s the mayhem.’”
But as Jeanne points out, “The work is funny.” The work in Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies & Clowns is also mysterious, tender, and angry. Many of his couples rise into the sky on their love, as in Chagall.
I found the book in a box in a storage locker just as I was writing a recent piece about a murderer. The amazing thing, the admirable thing, is that Steig channeled his deep feeling into art over a very long life. The murder stayed in his dreams.
“Art, including juvenile literature, has the power to make any spot on earth the living center of the universe,” Steig said in his Caldecott acceptance speech. “[I]t helps us to know life in a way that still keeps before us the mystery of things. It enhances the sense of wonder. And wonder is respect for life.”
