Iain Topliss’s study of four New Yorker cartoonists clusters several interesting essays under a central argument remarkable only for its modesty. “I don’t want to suggest … that the kind of humor one finds in ‘The New Yorker’ is ‘transgressive’ or ‘subversive,'” Mr. Topliss assures us in his introduction. He argues merely that the cartoons encourage skepticism and self-doubt, and thus indicate that the American middle class has a greater propensity for irony and self-criticism than it is generally given credit for.

Fortunately, Mr. Topliss’s individual discussions of the artists carry him beyond this cautious thesis. In work that rarely commented explicitly on national traumas, these artists registered the angst felt by the cultural elite during periods of the last century. Peter Arno recorded the exhilaration of the 1920s and the letdown that followed; William Steig and Charles Addams protested against the oppressive banality of the 1940s and 1950s; and Saul Steinberg described an intellectual and aesthetic response to the changing American landscape of the 1960s and 1970s.

The first three of these artists often expressed personal and social conflicts through images of highly pitched battles between men and women. Arno’s sexually charged drawings, for instance, both celebrated the liberated spirit of the 1920s and reflected an undercurrent of anxiety beneath the high living. The son of a wealthy New York judge, a Yale dropout, and a major party boy, Arno arrived at the New Yorker when it was a few months old and provided a crucial link between the magazine and the world of cabarets and speakeasies.

His cartoons feature voluptuous, air-headed women, drawn in a manner that Mr. Topliss identifies as the source for the style of such “semieroticized children’s characters” as Lara Croft, and Betty and Veronica in the “Archie” comics. Arno’s women are observed either being aggressively chased by lecherous old stockbrokers, or haplessly wooed by bloodless, effete young men. Critics have called Arno’s drawings sexist, and Lee Lorenz, a former art editor of the magazine, described Arno as having “kept The New Yorker’s testosterone level well-above the national average.”

Mr. Topliss argues that the leering stockbrokers reflect Arno’s resentment of his father’s generation, and that the cartoons are declarations of solidarity with the young. But this doesn’t explain the unsettling disparity of power and energy between the old and the young men, nor Arno’s own caustic comments: “At no time in the history of the world have there been so many damned morons gathered together in one place as here in New York right now,” he said in 1937. “The town squirms with them. Vain little girls with more alcohol in their brains than sense … Yes, those people make me mad, the young ones more than the old ones.”

There is an edge to Arno’s art, and a dark side to his life, as well. He lived beyond his means, and his marriages were unhappy. Arno and his first wife, New Yorker writer Lois Long, had violent fights that sometimes resulted in Long’s coming into the office with a black eye.

Steig’s oeuvre is enormous, and Mr. Topliss concentrates on his output during the 1940s and 1950s, when he wrestled with anxieties that were pervasive in his bohemian circle in Greenwich Village. Steig’s parents were Polish-Jewish immigrants and socialists, and he was fiercely liberal. He believed that people were naturally good, but were deformed by society and convention. “I began to feel neurotic when I was grown up,” Steig told an interviewer in 1972, when he was 64. “I began to feel impure, and everybody I knew felt the same way.”

In the late 1930s, as his interior world became more turbulent, his work took a darker path. Until then, he had been known at the New Yorker for his cheerful portraits of lower middle-class life and his ongoing series about children, “Small Fry.” Now he began publishing books of what he called “symbolic drawings.” “About People” (1939), “The Lonely Ones” (1942), and “Persistent Faces” (1945) all feature grotesque images of contemporary personality types.

Harold Ross considered this work not right for the New Yorker, but it was admired by social scientists like Margaret Mead (Steig’s sister-in-law) and the psychoanalyst and theorist of modern neurosis, Karen Horney. In the mid-1940s, Steig himself became a patient of the controversial analyst Wilhelm Reich, whose view that people’s bodies were distorted by social forces matched perfectly Steig’s artistic instincts. Reich’s view of the perniciousness of sexual repression, and his criticism of marriage, also meshed well with Steig’s own beliefs. The next two volumes Steig published, “Till Death Do Us Part: Some Ballet Notes on Marriage” and “The Rejected Lovers,” portray love as a form of neurosis, and marriage as a kind of imprisonment.

Other critics have noted the hostility toward marriage and toward women that surfaces in many mid-century New Yorker cartoons and have linked it to a trend that Barbara Ehrenreich calls the “gray-flannel dissidents”: men who had white-collar jobs and lived in the suburbs, but who considered themselves superior to their cookie-cutter neighbors and felt disdain for the blandness of 1950s culture.

These men blamed their wives’ acquisitiveness for keeping them on the corporate treadmill, and thus preventing them from following their dreams. Steig himself complained that the obligation to support not only his parents, but his own multiple households (he married four times) kept him from being his “free and natural self.”

But Mr. Topliss’s four subjects suggest that there is more to the history of sexual dynamics in the New Yorker cartoons than the resentment of the “gray flannel dissidents.” In Charles Addams’s work, the malice between husbands and wives is mutual, an element of Addams’s general horrification of the American suburbs. His couples casually plot to murder each other: A woman packs a bomb in her husband’s lunchbox. A man, his trailer positioned on the edge of a large cliff, asks his wife, “Oh, darling, can you step out for a moment?”

Steinberg’s drawings of the 1950s and 1960s, featuring American cliches like Indians, the Statue of Liberty, and the pyramid on the dollar bill, reflected delight in the national landscape as well as humorous criticism. “Steinberg’s temper of mind is that of a man who is genuinely responsive to kitsch, neither horrified nor seduced by it,” Mr. Topliss writes. But if the work of the three other artists in his study tapped into a violence hidden under the surface of American life, by the 1970s that violence was out in the open. Steinberg’s drawings became pessimistic and disturbing: images of a New York City filled with armed Mickey Mice and prostitutes who are all legs.

The greatest flaw of Mr. Topliss’s book is the small number of reproductions; the book begs to be read alongside the recently published “Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker” (Black Dog & Leventhal, 655 pages, $60). The sparseness of the images is particularly unfortunate, since the drawings themselves make the strongest case for what, cautious academic language aside, is really Mr. Topliss’s point: how much social criticism can be channeled into comic art.

Ms.Taylor last wrote in these pages on art theft.