The Old Thrill of Suicide: The Book Covers of Charles Addams

The cartoonist Charles "Chas" Addams (1912-1988) is, of course, best remembered for the family bearing his name which he created in a series of cartoons for the New Yorker. The various characters who shared a haunted house, originally without names but given them for the spin-off TV series, quickly garnered lasting popularity. Addams himself was a talented and funny man who did his best to live up to a reputation for grotesquery and outrageousness.

A good selection of cartoons from one of his books, Monster Rally, is up at the fantastic Golden Age Comic Book Stories, from where I stole these three fine, characteristic cartoons. (Click for readable versions.)

Addams also designed a number of book covers, which is where we come in. As well as the covers for his own books...

..he also did a number of cover designs for similarly-minded writers.

I would love to see an edition of Waugh's The Loved One ilustrated by Addams throughout. If any artist was to find death no barrier to producing new work, it would surely be Addams.

Regarding that Ray Bradbury book, above, an interesting bit of trivia. Originally, Addams and Bradbury were going to collaborate on an imaginary family history about a clan of gothic monstosities: the 'Elliott Family'. The project never got off the ground, but Bradbury went on to write about the Elliots in From the Dust Returned (finally published in 2001 with an old Addams cover), while Addams preliminary sketches for the Elliots ended up morphing into the beginnings of his Addams Family characters.

The Addams Family by Charles Addams

The Addams Family by Charles Addams

Charles Addams

Written 21 December, 2010

Charles Addams

In my previous post, dear reader, I said I would talk about three more cartoonists I liked.

When I was in high school I spent long hours in the library at the air force base near my parents' home in Tennessee. There I discovered science fiction, and there I discovered the macabre work of Mr. Addams.

I loved the tone of the Addams books. They were full of sinister characters and creatures, blended seamlessly into modern life.

Many of the single-panel cartoons had been published in The New Yorker, a magazine with which I was then unfamiliar. His work appeared regularly in that magazine from 1932 until his death. His cartoons also appeared in Colliers and Reader's Digest.

Addams was born in 1912 and died in 1988. He was a descendant of the family that begot U.S. Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams and was first cousin twice removed to social reformer Jane Addams. 

In 1964 the signature family in Addams' works came to live on the American television show The Addams Family. Later, of course, there were movies.

Addams' work had a strong effect on my young mind. It was perhaps my first exposure to someone with a sense of humor that matched mine.

Well, there had been Mad magazine, of course, but even at age nine or ten I found its humor horribly juvenile.  In a good way, but still...

Had it not been for Addams, I might not have been prepared for the work of Gahan Wilson.