Charles Addams (1912–1988)

This large-format book collects three hundred of Charles Addams' magazine cartoons, along with a couple dozen color cover illustrations, mostly from The New Yorker, and from his entire long career. Although Addams is best known for the eponymous Family (Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, etc.), they appear in only a minority of these cartoons. If those are set to the side, what remains reminds me of nothing so much as the Gary Larson "Far Side" oeuvre. There are the same sort show more of surreal juxtapositions, agency given to animals, incongruous cultural encounters, and borderline misanthropy.

A repeated note here (which does not appear in Larson's work) is that of uxoricide and mariticide, whether just accomplished, in progress, or merely fantasized. High culture is used to comic effect with visual allusions to Munch's "The Scream" (261) and to the Laocoön Group (215), among others.

Perhaps my favorite in the book (158) shows a man in a barber's chair viewing the receding cascade of opposing mirror images of his head, where the one five reflections deep has the face of a monster. Another choice cartoon shows men reclining around an opium den, with a sign on the wall that reads, "Occupancy by more than 31 persons is dangerous and unlawful" (51).

Although the earliest of these cartoons is almost ninety years old, they have aged quite well, and the whole book is a treat. show less

Cute little collection of cooking-related Addams cartoons (lots of cannibal and witch cauldrons, strange things behind Automat windows, etc). It also includes several recipes, some modified to sound horrific (2 tsp squirrel blood, or substitute sherry...), some just supposed to sound horrific (stuffed heart). I was delighted to find a recipe for black pudding! (yeah, yeah, it includes blood. It's yummy, though).

A mid-fifties collection of New Yorker cartoons by Charles Addams, patriarch and eponym of the Addams Family. The family in these cartoons is much more familiar to watchers of the TV show that in earlier cartoons. In fact, one of the last in the book shows them sitting down together by the TV, to watch "the story of a family that might be your next-door neighbors, and of their everyday life among everyday people" which had me dashing to look up dates to see if these still predated the TV show more show. (They do.) All the cartoons in this book are wonderfully morbidly funny, many of them of the sort where you stare for a few seconds thinking "I don't get it" -- and then you notice the tentacle. show less

I'm so happy I found this. I've been looking for it for years, and it has entirely lived up to my expectations. I'll never think of nursery rhymes the same way again. The standard text of nursery rhymes is accompanied by full-blown Addams creepiness. My favourite is "There was an old woman, Lived under a hill, And if she isn't gone, She lives there still." The full-colour, double-page illustration shows a happy little old lady in a rocking chair, knitting her cat a sweater. There is tea show more brewing on her potbellied stove. Nice and cozy, right? Except that her home under the hill happens to be a bomb shelter, and off in the background we see the decaying ruins of civilization. On some pages the creepiness is obvious, like the humongous, grinning spider frightening Miss Muffet. On others, you have to look at it for a moment before you realize what's wrong: What have Jack Sprat and his wife been eating?!? Then sometimes nothing is actually wrong with the picture--it's just kind of...off. show less