As many of you know Im a big fan of the Addams Family. Many people dont know they started out in the New Yorker Magazine created by Charles Addams Until the TV show the characters didnt even have names. Addams was a cartoonist with a macabre sense of humor, who delighted in juxtaposing the fantastic and gruesome with the mundane and ordinary. As early as 1935, when his cartoons started appearing in The New Yorker — perhaps Americas most prestigious humor magazine — he displayed an ability to get big laughs out of truly jarring situations and images. Without his wit to put them in their proper light, the things he drew might have been chilling, disturbing, even horrifying; but when they came from him they were funny. In 1937, a few regular characters began to emerge. At first it was just an incredibly creepy woman (Morticia) and her even creepier butler, but other members of the household soon turned up — her grinning lunatic of a husband, their malevolent children, the wild-haired old lady, etc. And the house itself began to take on a stable form, based (very loosely) on an old Victorian structure in the neighborhood where Addams grew up. As for the real-life Addams and the cartoons that started it all — he seemed to have lost interest in his fictional family after it became a media sensation, as they appear less often in his later cartoon collections. In fact, in the last collection to appear in his lifetime, Creature Comforts(1981), they arent seen at all. Charles Addams died in 1988. The characters he created, however, refuse to. FYI is it any wonder at 6ft8 I am called Lurch by friends and my clients. Paul
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 03:46:00 +0000