Charles Addams Books

Part of the beauty of the original "Addams Family" tv show, and an aspect of the show that has been almost totally lost throughout the first average animated series, the two okay movies, and the most recent abysmal animated series, was that the Addamses themselves did not exist in a vacuum; surrounding them, throughout their town and the world, was a network of individuals, shops, and organizations that shared the same "bizarre" tastes that they did. The Addamses were never non-conformists as such; they honestly thought that most of the world was just like them. This "Addamsian" subculture was, admittedly, quite understated in the tv show, but Charles Addams's original comics portrayed it clearly and delightfully. It's a world of three-armed people, casual magic, ingenious children, multi-species interaction, and, almost always, a sense of the macabre which recognizes itself as nothing but part of the norm. In addition to the Addams Family characters themselves (never actually named in the comics; they were "the Addams family" in the same way that the characters in "Doonesbury" would be called "the Trudeau troupe"), there were other occasional recurring characters, providing a sense of continuity that emphasized Mr. Addams's ongoing theme: everyone and everything is weird, to someone else, somewhere. The only flaw in this book is one that it may not have been originally intended to address (the book was first published years ago, only reissued recently in conjunction with the movie): it's not a complete collection of all the comics featuring the proto-Addamses themselves. Still, the comics of Charles Addams rarely fail to entertain and provoke. Gary Larson and his legion of imitators have never really reached the heights that Charles Addams by and large maintained until his death.

My Crowd is a collection of some 200 cartoons (most of which are full page) by the comically macabre illustrator Charles Addams. About half of these cartoons focus on the ghoulish family who enjoys the things in life many find to be hideous (like lovely poisonous plants and Ebenezer Scrooge "bless his heart"). This family, who was introduced by Addams in the New Yorker in 1932, spawned the T.V. show named after the artist. The cartoons featuring this family are some of the best ones in this books; from the bratty son hanging up "Bridge Out" and "Blasting Ahead" signs he stole for his bedroom to the proud parents reading a letter from the school about their son's "perverse, crafty, and wanton" behavior, to poor "Lurch" being admonished for not picking up an eye of newt at the grocery store. The father is more freaky than the amorous Gomez of the T.V. show. The drawings of the mother (Morticia in the series, the characters were not given names in the cartoon) are the best. Her body language and expressions are great, even if she is just standing with her arms crossed. Other reoccurring characters, like the handyman who's asked to fix a squeak on a trap door and puts in a window so the family has a delightful view of the cemetery lends the family series even more continuity.

The other cartoons are also often ghoulish but also very witty. Some have no text like the drawing of two unicorns watching in the rain as an arc sails away or an actress screaming directly to the camera on the movie screen while everyone in the audience turns around to see what she's screaming at. Then there is the couple driving past a sign that says "Children At Play" and, ahead of them, you see children ready to push a giant boulder into their path. Another one of my favorites are the prince and princess telling the Medieval marriage counselor they are not "living happily ever after." The cartoons were taken from six books by Charles Addams so, it is probably meant to whet one's appetite around the time of the last Addam's Family movie rather than to be an exhaustive chronicle of Addams' work. If you like dark humor (i.e. Edward Gorey) this book is for you.

The argument can be made that Charles Addams is the father of American "sick" humor, starting when "The New Yorker" publishes his first cartoon in 1935. Of the 189 drawings in this 20th anniversary reprinting of "My Crowd," a collection of the best cartoons from the first six Addams books, 185 originally appeared in "The New York" between 1937 and 1969. Of those 50 are of the Addams family, and if all you know is the classical television series or the pair of theatrical films, then you owe yourself a chance to see the inspired original. My father had a collection of cartoons from "The New York," which had several choice efforts of Addams' work, all of which seem to be included here. But even in my pre-teen years it was clear that Chas. Addams was something special. One of my favorites was of a patent attorney pointing a strange weapon out his window and telling the applicant: "Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why it doesn't even slow them up."

But so many of the classic Addams cartoons do not even involve captions, leaving it to the viewer to figure out "what is wrong with this picture" (e.g., a baby carriage with bars on it, the list of ingredients on the side of the Witch's gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, and Uncle Fester sharpening the points on the top of the iron fence). The world of Chas. Addams is just slightly a skewed, but in a ghoulish and macabre way. The only complaint would be that seeing the Addams family colored in on the cover seems so wrong (I prefer to think of them as all have pale and pasty complexions). But that is not going to be enough to stop you from tracking down "Drawn and Quartered," "Creature Comforts," "The Dear Dead Days," and the rest of the collections of the cartoons of Charles Adams.

Somehow I always wind up first whenever I get a book that I'm sure dozens of other reviewers would be all over, like white on rice! This book, a serious and academic study of four New Yorker cartoonists, I would have thought would be a natural. Maybe people got turned off by the cover, a particularly grisly Charles Addams sketch in a drab, battleship gray color. And yet, the sketch itself, a crowded movie theater packed with weeping, intensely uncomfortable viewers, in the middle of which you see one of Addams' trademark characters watching whatever is happening on the screen (a death?) and chuckling happily--yes, the sketch itself encapsulates some of Topliss' thoughts about the position of spectatorship vis-a-vis the New Yorker artists he covers.

We see ourselves in Uncle Fester's grin, for we feel we too are different than the rest of the crowd, and that we have a privileged and superior position to what is being displayed on the screen. How these four artists managed to animate their own, very different sense of the "unique," is Topliss' subject.

He won't make you want to read much more about Peter Arno, the aristocratic playboy for whom comics were decidedly slumming. Of William Steig, Topliss shows us how first Karen Horney and then Wilhelm Reich animated his thinking about creativity and the act of drawing. His was a fascinating life, but again, I'm not so sure he was so utterly a genius at his art. Addams and Steinberg come off the best, although Topliss' "fame" angle on Steinberg made him sound a little like those celebrities who complain about the paparazzi even when they're courting press attention.

Topliss sees US culture, New Yorker division, through the distant, cold eyes of an Australian. Sometimes the onlooker sees more of the game, and there's a sense in which one of our better academics might be the best candidate to write about the classic Australian cartoonists of the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. Turnabout is fair play, and in the writing game, objectivity is nearly everything. He has a rousing salute to Melbourne at the end of his introduction, in which he also explains why he seems to ignore the contributions of two other excellent cartoonists from the same period and venue, namely, Thurber and Hokinson. His salute to his hometown is worth the price of the book, though it's a little odd. Perhaps he could write another book about the "tall poppy syndrome" and why people in Melbourne are both proud of, and dismissive of, their celebrated comic muse, the one and only Kylie Minogue.