Creator / Charles Addams

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A long-time contributor of cartoons to The New Yorker magazine, Charles Samuel Addams^note or "Chas Addams", as he usually signed his artwork (January 7, 1912 – September 29, 1988) specialized in whimsically grotesque scenes, which was evidently something of a case of Drawing What He Knew.

One set of his recurring characters became the basis for the television sitcom (and later film series) The Addams Family, while Addams also drew such classic one-off cartoons as a skier somehow going around a tree on both sides at once; a moustachioed villain with a young damsel slung over his shoulder heading down into a subway, presumably to tie her to the tracks; and a banana peel lying on a busy city sidewalk, cordoned off by "caution" signs.

(Fun fact: Addams was actually distantly related to US Founding Father John Adams and his family, despite the differences in surname spelling.)

Works by Charles Addams with their own pages:

• The Addams Family cartoons

Other works by Charles Addams provide examples of the following tropes:

• Apathetic Citizens: "It doesn't take much to collect a crowd in New York."◊^note Should the image be lost — the comment is made by a man to his friend as they walk by a crowd gawking at another man being attacked by a giant octopus that has come out of a manhole. Reportedly Addams' favorite cartoon.
• Artistic Title: Addams provided these for the films The Old Dark House (1963) and Murder by Death (1976).
• Awful Wedded Life: Pretty much any depiction of a husband and wife involves one or the other either fantasizing about, actively plotting, or cleaning up after doing their spouse in. Any featuring the Addams Family themselves, however, were a subversion.
• Banana Peel: One of his more famous strips has a banana peel lying on a sidewalk, surrounded by barricades and Caution signs.
• Black Comedy: It's basically his trademark.
• Ceiling Banger: One cartoon depicts a man angrily tapping his ceiling with his cane... while above him is a completely ransacked apartment with the owner Bound and Gagged.
• Chained to a Railway: Used as a gag more than once.
• Collector of the Strange: Addams himself. He had his ultimately fatal heart attack while seated behind the wheel of one of his (parked) classic automobiles.
• Conjoined Twins: Sometimes showed up.
• Dada Comics: Occasionally ventures into this territory.
• Death as Comedy: Again, done numerous times. One typical example has a woman inviting her husband to enter the house, while she has a gun aimed at the door.
• Death Ray: At the window of the local patent office: "Death ray, fiddlesticks! It doesn't even slow them up!"
• Deliberately Monochrome: Most cartoons are in black-and-white and take place in dark settings.
• Droste Image: Subverted in one cartoon, where an ordinary-looking man is reflected in a pair of barbershop mirrors to this effect... but one of the reflections shows a demonic-looking horned monster in his place.
• Enfant Terrible: Shows up often, even besides the Addams family kids.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: One cartoon depicts an Alien Invasion, with one of the invaders being greeted by a homeowner and told, "I'm sorry, sonny. We've run out of candy."
• Fur Is Clothing: One cartoon depicts a bear leaving a fur-storage place in boxer shorts and sunglasses.
• Jumping Out of a Cake: Subverted in a two-panel strip — a cake big enough to be used for this is wheeled out at a party of old men, but in the second panel, the guests are eating actual gigantic slices of cake. Everyone looks a bit annoyed except for one guy.
• Kidnapping Bird of Prey: An adult human is being carried off by one of these from a beach.. with the guy's wife running along underneath yelling up at him to drop the keys to their car.
• Multiple Head Case: Pretty common.
• Nightmare Fetishist: The man was openly into the dark and macabre.
• Obstacle Ski Course: He may have been the first to depict a single set of ski tracks going around both sides of a large tree.
• Opium Den: One of these in all its usual squalor, with a sign prominently posted on a wall stating its officially regulated occupancy limits
• Our Gargoyles Rock: They show up on occasion.
• Rule of Funny: Bizarre situations without explanation are common.
• Shotgun Wedding: A white explorer being subjected to a "blowgun wedding" by a tribe of pygmies.
• Shout-Out:
  • And an unexpected one at that! Apparently Baby Jane Hudson was too scary even for the Addams family...◊
  • "One gets used to the flying fishes, but that bloody dawn coming up like thunder is driving me crackers."
• Slave Galley: A recurring setting for gags.
• Surreal Humor / Surreal Horror: Go hand in hand in his cartoons.
• Urban Fantasy: Many of his cartoons had this feel, with the strange and supernatural happening amidst crowded cities.
• What Could Have Been: At one time Addams and Ray Bradbury planned to collaborate on an anthology book involving Bradbury's own fictional monster family, the Elliotts, but the project never came to fruition.