Addams, Charles | An original cartoon featuring the Addams Family

Addams, Charles

"Oh, She's Furious Because They Put Her on the Honor Roll at School"

Ink, watercolor, and wash on drawing board (430 x 350 mm), signed "Chas Adams" in the image, further inscribed and dated at top ("For Minnie + Jim — Chas Addams 1964"), captioned at bottom ("Oh, She's Furious Because They Put Her on the Honor Roll at School"); editorial markings in graphite, some minor marginal toning and fingersoiling, reverse with New Yorker stamps. Framed and glazed. 

An original cartoon featuring the Addams Family

Addams' work was characterized by its dark humor and macabre characters, some of whom became known together as The Addams Family. The present work first appeared in the New Yorker in the October 16th, 1954 issue, and shows Wednesday Addams throwing a tantrum on her bed while Morticia, Grandmama, and Pugsley look on with bemusement. 

In a 2010 interview, Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of the New Yorker, addressed the characteristically dark nature of Addams's work, as exemplified in the present cartoon: "I think his influence extends beyond the horror genre, to humor not as a comforting 'laughter is the best medicine' anodyne but as something deeply skeptical of the purported values of middle-class American life. By making us laugh at, and with, his fiendish protagonists, he makes us temporarily share their values, and doubt our own."