By Charles Addams (Methuen)
ISBN 0-413-55370-1
Charles Addams was a cartoonist who made his real life as extraordinary as his dark, mordantly funny drawings. Whether he manufactured his biography to enhance his value to feature writers or was genuinely a warped and wickedly wacky individual is irrelevant, (although it makes for great reading: Once again the internet awaits the siren call of your search engine…).
What is important is that in all the years he drew and painted those creepily sardonic, and macabre gags and illustrations for The New Yorker, Colliers, TV Guide and others (from 1932 onwards, but regularly and consistently from 1938 until his death) he managed to enthral his audience with a devilish mind and a soft, gentle approach that made him a household name long before television turned his characters into a hit and generated a juvenile craze for monsters and grotesques that lasts to this day.
This volume is a reissue of his second collection of cartoons, first published in 1947, and semi-occasionally ever since. Although his works are long overdue for a definitive collected edition, many of his books (eleven volumes of drawings and a biography) are still readily available and should you not be as familiar with his actual cartoons as with their big and small screen descendents you really owe it to yourself to see the uncensored brilliance of one of America’s greatest humorists.
© 1940-1947 the New Yorker Magazine, Inc. In Canada © 1947 Charles Addams.