PAW 15 – The Penguin Charles Addams (1845) by Charles Addams

The Penguin Charles Addams; Penguin Paperback 1845; 1962 edition. Cover illustration by Charles Addams

The Penguin Charles Addams is one of a fun series of books that Penguin tried in the early Sixties, and that was cartoon collections. I may feature more of them in further reviews; not all of them are great. Most of them were British, at least one of them was French, and a couple were American — which Charles Addams was.

He is most famous for what spun off from his comics, the popular 1964-1966 TV show The Addams Family, and the two 1990s movies of the same name. And this collection contains many of the ‘Family’ cartoons, originally printed in the New Yorker magazine. Most of the cartoons hinge on a quirkiness bordering on the surreal — often with some sort of deformity as the pivot point — but not all of them are macabre. An artist sculpting an angel out of stone calls out the window “Same time next Monday, then, Mrs Grant?” Some are subtle, such as a row of sheets hanging outside a house with eye-holes cut out of them, and some are plain racist (less said about those, the better). Some are of, shall we say, limited humour, such as a nurse poking her head out of a delivery room door to announce “It’s a baby!”

The strength is definitely the Addams Family cartoons — a whole cinema full of people crying and Uncle Fester laughing, Pugsley and Wednesday returning from summer camp in pet travellers, and Morticia Addams’ parting advice to the babysitter “…keep your back to the walls at all times.”

The downside of this collection is that it’s rather short — you can go all the way through it in less than fifteen minutes. Its 120 pages hold about that many cartoons, but Addams’ style is so perfectly polished, and his humour so unlike anyone else, that it is a pleasure to have it on the shelf in order to pick it up and dip into it every so often.

What is A Penguin a Week? Visit the original site.

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