My Crowd

I wanted to give my husband a Xmas present of Addams work - he wasn't familiar with the cartoonist. This book was a perfect example of his darkly fun cartoons.

There is a good mix of the strange and absurd in this book, as well as Addams family - about 50-50. Many pages depict wintery themes with an evil sense of the macabre lurking in the background... A total of 192 pages of wyrd. It gets you thinking about how the indomitable potential of the human spirit. (Spooky!) This is the kind of book to read when you're having a tough time with people, the weather is bad, or you're in the hospital feeling fatal. Why not give it as a gift? These cartoons have a creative, strange, psychological tweak that will keep you coming back for a laugh.

I thaught that this was one of the best comic books I've ever read. Half the comics don't have dialouge, yet the pictures are absoloutly wonderful.Being only ten myself, I don't understand a few of the comics, but it's fun to figure them out. One of my favorites is when Gomez is telling his children a bedtime story about " dear old Scrooge, bless his heart." I have always been addicted to the Addams family, but even if you've never heard of Charles Addams, you're sure to lap this book right up and beg for more.

The argument can be made that Charles Addams is the father of American "sick" humor, starting when "The New Yorker" publishes his first cartoon in 1935. Of the 189 drawings in this 20th anniversary reprinting of "My Crowd," a collection of the best cartoons from the first six Addams books, 185 originally appeared in "The New York" between 1937 and 1969. Of those 50 are of the Addams family, and if all you know is the classical television series or the pair of theatrical films, then you owe yourself a chance to see the inspired original. From Lurch giving Morticia a start (19) to Uncle Fester smiling while everybody else in the audience is weeping copiously (192), these are among the best cartoons in the book and evince a dry wit that could never really translate onto the small screen or the silver screen. My father had a collection of cartoons from "The New York," which had several choice efforts of Addams' work, all of which seem to be included here. But even in my pre-teen years it was clear that Chas. Addams was something special. One of my favorites was of a patent attorney pointing a strange weapon out his window and telling the applicant: "Death ray, fiddlesticks! Why it doesn't even slow them up" (181). One of the things I picked up on this time around through this book were those Addams cartoons that do not look like Addams cartoons. By this I simply mean those in which the artistic style is not what we are used to from his pen (e.g., his explanation for Stonehenge on page 30). There are also several cartoons dedicated to turning the traditional fairy tale on their head (or some other body part), and I like the one where the alien invasion arrives on Halloween night (161), and the one where Leonardo Da Vinci is trying to get Mona Lisa to smile (187), and stop me now before I name half the cartoons in the book. But so many of the classic Addams cartoons do not even involve captions, leaving it to the viewer to figure out "what is wrong with this picture" (e.g., a baby carriage with bars on it, the list of ingredients on the side of the Witch's gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, and Uncle Fester sharpening the points on the top of the iron fence). The world of Chas. Addams is just slightly a skewed, but in a ghoulish and macabre way. The only complaint would be that seeing the Addams family colored in on the cover seems so wrong (I prefer to think of them as all have pale and pasty complexions). But that is not going to be enough to stop you from tracking down "Drawn and Quartered," "Monster Rally," "Favorite Haunts, "Creature Comfrots," "The Dear Dead Days," and the rest of the collections of the cartoons of Charles Addams. Just be sure you read them all before you die.

Part of the beauty of the original "Addams Family" tv show, and an aspect of the show that has been almost totally lost throughout the first average animated series, the two okay movies, and the most recent abysmal animated series, was that the Addamses themselves did not exist in a vacuum; surrounding them, throughout their town and the world, was a network of individuals, shops, and organizations that shared the same "bizarre" tastes that they did. The Addamses were never non-conformists as such; they honestly thought that most of the world was just like them. This "Addamsian" subculture was, admittedly, quite understated in the tv show, but Charles Addams's original comics portrayed it clearly and delightfully. It's a world of three-armed people, casual magic, ingenious children, multi-species interaction, and, almost always, a sense of the macabre which recognizes itself as nothing but part of the norm. In addition to the Addams Family characters themselves (never actually named in the comics; they were "the Addams family" in the same way that the characters in "Doonesbury" would be called "the Trudeau troupe"), there were other occasional recurring characters, providing a sense of continuity that emphasized Mr. Addams's ongoing theme: everyone and everything is weird, to someone else, somewhere. The only flaw in this book is one that it may not have been originally intended to address (the book was first published years ago, only reissued recently in conjunction with the movie): it's not a complete collection of all the comics featuring the proto-Addamses themselves. Still, the comics of Charles Addams rarely fail to entertain and provoke. Gary Larson and his legion of imitators have never really reached the heights that Charles Addams by and large maintained until his death.