The Addams Family original pages by Charles Addams

Who is Charles Addams?

Charles Addams, born January 7, 1912 in Westfield (New Jersey) and died September 29, 1988 in New York, is an American cartoonist. Known for his dark humor and macabre characters, he signed under the name of Chas Addams.

He is the author of The Addams Family, a series of cartoons (humorous cartoons) published from 1938 in the American magazine The New Yorker and which spawned four films (two live-action productions and two computer-animated films), six television series — two of which were animated — a Broadway musical, several video games, a pinball game and many by-products.

Origin and analysis of this unusual family

The Addams Family members are a satirical inversion of the ideal American family of the xx^e century: a wealthy, queer aristocratic clan that revels in the macabre and doesn't care if others find them weird or scary.

The characters that compose it were not all born at the same time, it is a group of individuals that gradually grew and only emerged as a real family several years after the first appearance of each character. Moreover, their last name, Addams, is not the result of a conscious artistic choice, but was simply imposed in reference to the name of their creator. As for first names, the members of the family did not originally have any either. They were baptized with the names we know them only for the television series The Addams Family in 1964.

According to Robert Mankoff, a cartoonist from New Yorker who knew the author, Charles "Chas" Addams would have been one of the first to realize how much incongruity could be tolerated in a drawing and would then work as a joke. In this, he thinks Addams reveals a penchant for a type of Dadaist humor that is now common in newspaper cartoons and on the internet.

Mankoff notes that the most used comic effect in The Addams Family is the resumption of the familiar in order to invert it. He thinks the author was happy to overturn our assumptions about normality and the relationship to good and evil, in particular by making the reader identify with this strange family and not with the normal people they meet ( “it makes us temporarily share their values ​​and doubt ours”). According to him, Charles Addams drew on this vein of American Gothic which borders on the paranoid: seeing behind each comforting facade, the uncomfortable truth of the duality of human nature. But according to him, where gothic literature usually combined this theme with romance, Addams made horror hilarious. She is disturbing, but at the same time friendly, identifiable and acceptable.