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Album

The Addams Trove

By Robert Mankoff
November 29, 1998

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December 7, 1998 P. 150

December 7, 1998 P. 150

The New Yorker, December 7, 1998 P. 150

ALBUM about Charles Addams, as preface to four previously-unpublished

cartoons... Charles Addams was not The New Yorker’s most proli�c cartoonist.
That honor goes to Alan Dunn, who did an astounding nineteen hundred and
six cartoons for the magazine. Addams managed to publish barely twelve
hundred. But Addams is our most proli�c posthumous cartoonist. Addams
died on September 29, 1988. In the next �ve years, The New Yorker published,
from its Addams inven-tory, four covers and sixteen drawings; the last Addams
cartoon in our cupboard appeared, without special fan-fare, in the issue of
February 22, 1993. Now, ten years after Addams’s death, the haunting resumes.
He has started submitting cartoons again. Well, not he, actually. She. She is
Tee Addams, Charles Addams’s widow. This past summer, I travelled the
length of Long Island to a secluded house by a pond to see her. She had offered

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to show me some unpublished drawings by Charles Addams. There, amid a

family collection of casket handles, miniature suits of medieval armor, a statue
of a raven, a stuffed mongoose, and two pairs of brass knuckles, were more than
four hundred pencil sketches of ideas for cartoons which Addams had left at
the time of his death. In the language of the trade, we call these “roughs.”
When a rough is selected for the magazine, the artist redraws it—more
carefully, we hope, and usually in ink. Then it becomes a “�nish.” (Clearly, if
magazine cartooning is ever going to get any real respect it’s going to need
better jargon.) Some artists’ roughs are very rough indeed, but—as the
accompanying selection, a �rst installment, shows—many of the Addams
sketches were in a fairly �nished state. And the ideas that the drawings convey
aren’t sketchy at all. They bring us back to Addams’s macabre yet inviting world
of inverted values, surreal switcheroos, and quiet chills. In that world, a
deceptive calm prevails. But darkness is always lurking, even in the midday sun,
and big themes—mortality, mayhem, domination, power—are never far away.
No one has ever squeezed as many laughs out of ominousness as Charles
Addams did. And does. But enough analysis. Analyzing humor, they say, is like
dissecting a frog: nobody is much interested, and the frog dies. In Addams’s
world, though, a dead frog is the best kind. Just pop it in the cauldron, add eye
of newt, and stir.

View Article

Published in the print edition of the December 7 & 14, 1998, issue.

Bob Mankoff was the cartoon editor of The New Yorker from 1997 to 2017.

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