I suppose it’s natural. Once television gets its hands on a subject, that shapes how folks look at it from then on.
I’m talking about the Addams Family, that 60s TV sitcom that’s spawned movies and even a Broadway musical. You know the theme song…”They're creepy and they're kooky; Mysterious and spooky; They're all together ooky; The Addams family.”
But those “ooky” characters of cartoonist Charles Addams are only part of the story. As a kid, I remember the New Yorker being that magazine with the cartoons. I’d whip through the pages just to read them, and there were a lot. Never mind all those stories and the upscale ads.
But the most distinctive cartoons, in my mind, were those created by Addams, who had some 1,300 cartoons published in the New Yorker over the years (with only 57 featuring the famous family from TV fame).
The one depicting a skiing scene above, published in 1940, is often credited with putting Addams on the map. His tendency towards the oddball, the macabre, the ooky was to set him apart.
In the recently published American Scary, a history of U.S. works of horror media, author Jeremy Dauber quotes Boris Karloff’s tribute to Addams: “His preoccupation with hangman’s nooses and lethal doses is always innocent and gay.”
Alfred Hitchcock was a fan, owning two original Addams prints. In a 2006 New York Times article, Linda Davis wrote, “They said that Charles Addams slept in a coffin and drank martinis with eyeballs in them.”
Addams was a strange cat indeed—and a lot more than the source of a popular TV show.
I've been a fan of Addams' Work since I was a child. One of my fave 'toons, hailing from 1941, shows a crowded movie theater with Uncle Fester having a laugh while tears stream down the faces of all the other attendees. Classic! ;b