Addams, Charles

Charles Addams, in full Charles Samuel Addams, (born January 7, 1912, Westfield, New Jersey, U.S.—died September 29, 1988, New York City, New York), cartoonist whose drawings, known mostly through The New Yorker magazine, became famous in the United States as examples of macabre humour.

Addams attended various schools from 1929 to 1932; thereafter, aside from a brief period as a commercial artist, he was a free-lance cartoonist, selling his first work to The New Yorker in 1933. His cartoons began to attract considerable popular attention about 1940. Addams became famous for his ironic depictions of morbid or inexplicable behaviour by sinister-looking individuals. His best-known cartoons centred on a family of ghouls whose activities travestied those of a conventional family; for example, they prepare to pour boiling oil from the rooftop on a group of Christmas carolers. Addams’s ghoulish characters served as the basis of “The Addams Family,” a popular television series in the mid-1960s. Collections of his cartoons include Drawn and Quartered (1942), Addams and Evil (1947), Monster Rally (1950), Homebodies (1954), Nightcrawlers (1957), Dear Dead Days (1959), Black Maria (1960), The Charles Addams Mother Goose (1967), My Crowd (1970), Chas. Addams Favorite Haunts (1976), and Creature Comforts (1981).