Review: Charles Addams, A Cartoonist's Life

Charles Addams, A Cartoonist’s Life, by Linda Davis.
[rating:4/5]

It’s a nostalgic trip back into the previous century, when a guy could make a great living drawing cartoons for The New Yorker. Charles Addams, whose characters include The Addams Family, was an amazing wit. Interesting to find out that at times Addams and the other cartoonists would illustrate ideas from other people:

Frank Modell estimated that The New Yorker bought “maybe three to five [unsolicited gags] a year.” But Addams ideas were hard to come by. (“Dear Mr. Adams,” read a typical letter, “The other day on a highway leading out of Syracuse i saw a girl holding up a sign reading: BINGHAMTON; I AM ON THE PILL. I wonder if you could replace the girl with one of your old hags.”) “People send in little vultures and ideas for cartoons,” as Addams put it; “usually they’ve been suggested at least ten times before.”

Addams’ dark humor is well represented:

Some years earlier, Addams had received a clipping from the Times of London that had particularly pleased him, as it had made one of his old cartoons seem prescient, and he had kept that too. Titled “Man-Sized Meal,” it told of an Indonesian peasant who had been swallowed by a python “more than six yards long, too bloated to move. He was cut open to reveal the peasant’s still-clothed body,” Addams had recounted to Philip French. “So you see, it really does happen. And I thought I’d invented something. Perhaps they were influenced by my cartoon. Maybe the man wanted to be in the picture.”

A fun book, with a series of great Addams’ cartoons as well. They say it all:

Charles Addams, A Cartoonist’s Life, by Linda Davis.
[rating:4/5]