Graphic Grandeur (Grand Guignol Giggles Edition)

Though his output may seem better suited for October, it just so happens that cartoonist Charles Addams was born on this January day in 1912. Most of his cheerfully chilling single-panel cartoons appeared in The New Yorker, and after James Thurber, a special case that demands some qualifying, Addams was easily the most famous comics artist to emerge from that magazine. And while Thurber's prose now has its place in the literary canon, Addams' imagery is more firmly rooted in pop culture, even 34 years after his death. I'll show you why at the end of this post, but for now here's a 1980s interview with the macabre mirth maker: 

I'm a bit disappointed that there's no philosophy of life, but absent that, we'll just have to let the work speak (or shriek) for itself:

 

 

 

 

 

If a few of those characters in the above cartoons look familiar, that's because there's been some...

...media crossovers.

I know Christmas is over, but I couldn't resist showing you this:

Who is that Secret Santa?

 

 

Quips and Quotations (Workplace Safety Edition)

1937-2021

All the guys on the set smoked. They just dropped their butts and stepped on them. The producers worried that I might step on a smoldering cigarette and go up in flames...They gave me synthetic hair, which was flame-retardant.

--Felix Silla, stuntman and actor, Cousin Itt on TV's The Addams Family

Numerous obituaries are reporting that Cousin Itt was the only television Addams Family character to not have appeared first in a Charles Addams New Yorker cartoon, but as someone who as a kid used to check out Addams' cartoon collections from the library, that didn't sound right to me. Not much googling transpired before I found the above, though in the interest of fairness, I will note "Itt" is both not capitalized and spelled differently--Kirk