When he sketched extinct the outsize stocky dead body of Shrek, in his book of the same title, the late William Steig never imagined his charming taradiddle about a benign, swamp-dwelling ogre would become a phenomenon.
After all, Steig only began to turn prohibited books for children at age 60. At the time, he was already a long-celebrated (and adult-oriented) cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine.
But children's literature turned out to be a natural progression for the fecund Steig � and a boon for young readers.
"This was non disconnected from the rest of his career," says Claudia Nahson, curator of "From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig," a 2008 demonstrate at the Jewish Museum in New York. (The traveling show is now in San Francisco, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, through Sept. 7.)
"Steig loved children, he loved to write, he loved to draw," Nahson notes. "He said the secret to his winner was that he never really grew up."
Born in 1907, to Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the baseball-loving, Bronx-bred Steig mined his talent for drawing to help keep his kinsfolk during the Great Depression. He made his number one cartoon sale to The New Yorker in 1930, the start of his seven-decade least sandpiper at the magazine.
Steig's New Yorker output: more than 1,600 cartoons and 120 cover illustrations. He refined a witty, capricious visual style there, and you canful see its influence on such electric current New Yorker cartoonists as Roz Chast.
As Steig's obit in The New York Times assign it (he died in 2003 at age 95), his "squiggly" line drawings often pictured "satyrs, damsels, dogs and drunks." And his populace view was unsentimental just humane, playful, earthy and acerbic.
Fascinated by psychoanalysis, he also illustrated books by the controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, then created book-length collections of drawings as well as humorous sketches for cocktail napkins and greeting cards.
During the 1960s, a fellow urged Steig to come up with a storybook for kids. "He was reluctant at first," says Nahson, "because he didn't like to draw the same characters multiple times. He liked to draw something, then move on."
But beginning with the 1968 tome "Roland the Minstrel Pig" (around a lute-playing porker), Steig found an eager offspring audience for his fables � many of which featured beast characters, including "Doctor DeSoto" (about a dentist with a fox patient), and "Abel's Island" (about a mouse swept away in a storm).
Out of more than two dozen titles, Steig's most popular kids book today is surely "Shrek!"(The title, ironically, is a Yiddish word for fear or terror). The 1990 tome originated the story of a misanthropic, green-headed ogre befriended by a donkey and love by an ogre princess.
"Shrek is an anti-hero, and Steig constantly said the perfect torpedo is a flawed hero," says Nahson. "He constantly identified with the underdog."
When DreamWorks cherished to make a feature article film of the book, Steig agreed � and, in a Boston Globe interview, aforesaid he received $500,000 for the rights, less than he expected. (The first "Shrek" ultimately earned hundreds of millions of dollars, and spun off two moneymaking sequels.)
Intrigued with the figure, Steig "wrote notes to the producers, which I put in the museum show, sharing ideas he had for the script," Nahson explains. "The first of the 'Shrek' movies is genuinely the nighest to his work."
Lesser known films were made sooner of several Steig books ("Abel's Island," "Doctor DeSoto," "Pete's a Pizza"). But the immense critical and commercial response to "Shrek" (released in 2001), stunned the artist.
He even became a fan himself. Recounts Nahson, "Steig was selfsame old by then, in his 90s. But he went to see the movie and was asked his ruling. He aforementioned something like, 'It's plebeian, it's loathsome � and I love it!' "
Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com
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