Art For Art’s Sake #333: The Marvellous, Macabre World Of Charles Addams

by Richard Bruton

Time to take another of our weekly looks at the world of comics and the like, time for you to sit back and enjoy – it’s Art For Art’s Sake…

Well, I was planning on doing this, as is the usual format, with a miscellaneous collection of comic art and then ending with a look at the work of the great Charles Addams, who left this world 29 September 1988. But then I started finding more and more art that I simply had to share with you, either by Addams or in tribute to his mastery of the gloriously strange.

So, strap in and enjoy a whole A4AS looking at the timeless dark comedy of Charles Addams, whose work still looks every bit as good as it did back almost 90 years ago…

If you’re not aware, Addams was a cartoonist who created over 1,300 cartoons over the course of his lifetime, and a cartoonist whose work lives on with all its magnificently macabre imagery and moods. Indeed, you may well be enjoying the rather well-done, although a world away from the cartoons, Wednesday, on Netflix right now, starring one Wednesday Addams.

Born in 1912, his career in cartoons began in 1933 with his first (of what would become so many) drawings for the New Yorker magazine. It was in the pages of The New Yorker that his classic family of ghouls, the family that would later be known as The Addams Family, who would feature in 150 of Addams’s remarkably dark yet gloriously uplifting and strange cartoons. Although incredibly famous and well-known, it wasn’t until the TV series that ran from 1964-1966 that Gomez, Morticia et al received their names.

My personal introduction to the world of Charles Addams came through my dad. His entire comics library consisted of a handful of copies of Mad magazine, two Fred Bassett collections, the Giles cartoon annuals, and one slim volume of Charles Addams cartoons, The Penguin Charles Addams. And it was there that I first fell in love with his work, first experienced the darkness, the comedy, the cleverness that you find in his work, not to mention those moments of quietness, consideration, the melancholy nature of so much of what he does.

A genius, absolutely.

So, first, a little of what made Addams’s work so good… and one of my absolute favourites of his cartoons, a perfect example of the twisted comedy at play, not to mention how his genius came in making the reader fill in the blanks…