Charles Addams cartoons

"New Yorker" cartoons. "I always look at cartoons first," everyone says. The writer is no exception; he grew up with "New Yorker" cartoons. His mother, Katharine Angell--later Katharine White--became an editor for "The New Yorker" in 1925, when the writer was 5, and because she was involved in the magazine's art as well as it's prose there were always photocopied drawings and covers all over the house. The writer went for the cartoons right away. He ate up Rea Irvin's plump paired cops tooling around in tiny roadsters and Peter Arno's thin young men in tails crowding into speakeasies, among others. The first "New Yorker" cartoon to become famous may have been George V. Shanks's circus mishap--the butterfingered trapeze artist apologizing, and his dropped partner glaring back up from the bottom of the page. When Arno and Helen Hokinson and James Thurber and William Steig and Saul Steinberg and George Price and Charles Addams and the rest began to flourish, in the '30s, the "New Yorker" readers got lucky; the talent which emerged at that moment in time was a miracle--an accident of history which has yet to be repeated. The writer studied Peter Arno's work closely when he was growing up. Arno's men and women were inexorably stylish and partied all night; his drawings reminded you of the movies. His jokes were racy and his line was bolder than anyone else's. Charles Addams's outlandish dramas were often served up with innocuous lines that clarified and darkened the situation, both at the same time. The writer has been thinking about Addams's "Congratulations! It's a baby" for 60 years now, because his mother gave him the drawing while he was still in his teens, and he has since handed it along to his own son. The writers observes that George Price seemed to work in wire and steel and then draw the sculpture onto the page. Addams is a good place to convene the gallery talk proposing that the best carttons are captionless. The writer takes no stand here. Whatever works, whatever warms him, whatever makes him laugh is the drawing for him. Captions seem to come naturally with certain artists, such as Charles Saxon. Readers are forever complaining about the art: it isn't as funny as it used to be, it's bourgeois, it's repetitive, etc. They want the art to be higher. There will be days when the writer sympathizes with this position. Then he will open the next issue and find a perfect Leo Cullum cartoon, and he will relax. The same cartoon situations keep coming up--dog jokes and psychiatrist jokes, witch recipes and board conferences, dinner parties and desert islands, golf and space aliens, and a lot more. The flair and charm of these remarkable artists lend a dash of style to us readers, in turn, as we grow familiar with their stuff. Their tones and views can intersect with something of our own, and confer a momentary elan or a rubbed-off, lighter view of the familiar. Avenues and corners and mounted cops and sunsets can turn into Steinbergs without warning; dustballs and desserts and furniture wiggle to a Roz Chast beat. Ever since the writer came to work here, in 1956, the artists have been clustering in on Tuesday morning, carrying their latest drawings to show to the art editor, and cheering the writer up with their engaging gloomy smiles. Many have become friends of his--they have devoted their lives to the daunting proposition that they can go on being fresh and funny, week after week...

It’s been almost fifteen years since Charles Addams took his leave, but reopening his enormous lifetime album shortens the distance right away. Visiting his patented array of heartwarming ghouls and overworked witc doctors, delightful crypts and one-eyed space tots his interesting funerals, bulging pythons, an gentle executioners—all set forth in clear masterly dark washes—brings joy withou complication. The laughs are here, as always, but what comes with them is the vivifying sense of world seen with the anarchic clarity and creepy hopeful imagination of a bright ten-year-old ourselves at our first and worst. If his genius is missed in the magazine, it is for this kid’s-ey notion that absolutely anything can happen next the instant it crosses our mind. What if a man comes home and finds a twelve-foot-long overcoat on the front-hall coat hanger What if you get to the fifth green and see a tiny ladder going down into the cup with a “Men Working” sign beside it? Wouldn’t a thoughtful witch serve her cat ladleful of boiling-toad soup from her cauldron? Did a pair of unicorns, arrivin late, just miss the ark? Hey, what sort of pets live in a haunted house
For millions of the middle-aged, Addams will always be remembered as the originator of “The Addams Family” on television (and the competing “Munsters” show), which was developed from the inhabitants he’d conceived to fill the cobwebbed and happily haunted Victorian mansion in his cartoons. It was no great trick to convert this vivid cast into Morticia, Uncle Fester, and Lurch, and—given a laugh track and some strong script writers—to keep the original joke alive for two years, plus another thirty-five in reruns and spinoffs. The deal made Addams a rich man, and I don’t think he felt much regret when the hyped mannerisms and fading freshness of a long-running series came to replace the edge of his originals, and their artistry. His friends looked on this outcome with a shrug: that’s the way it goes, and good for you, Charlie. He had friends by the carload, who were drawn to his tall, semi-silent elegance and attentive ear. If you could drop a fox terrier or a Rolls-Royce Phantom II or a back-road route to Hyde Park into the conversation, he’d light up, and the odd passing sense that you’d been looking at an Addams rendering of Addams would go away.
He kept on drawing, and it is the drawings that hold up, in their perfect innocence and surprise: This sski lift has lifted off for Uranus. Four nasty-looking Goldilocks suspects face the music in a police lineup, for the Three Bears. There goes Mom, bending over again to sweep up the cartridges during another shootout, and the dorky editor of The Outdoor Boy is about to off himself with a slingshot. We’ve missed the 12:38 to Bridgeport but somehow found a seat on the Orient Local instead. Lucky us