Even Thing gets his own chapter, but be warned: he’s not quite the Thing we all know and love. There’s a pretty good spread of material, divided (more or less) by specific characters Morticia, Gomez, Lurch, even the house itself (Wednesday and Pugsley, in a show of typical enforced sibling charity, have to share a chapter). Fair enough – the shows and movies have gotten more than enough press over the years, and it can be good to have a strict brief.

However, that’s as in-depth a look at the show as we get- the 90’s movies are mentioned occasionally, albeit with what could be taken as a somewhat snobbish tone – this book is about the cartoons, and any mention of anything more modern is merely to note the differences between original and adaptation… even the guidelines are more to give Addams’ gut feelings about his creations to us. An Evilution doesn’t say one way or the other, but does tell how Charles Addams had a considerable amount of creative control – according to Miserocchi, he even had a say over camera angles. I’ve heard several conflicting stories about Addams’ attitude to the show he loved it, he hated it, he thought it was alright (but was concerned they were taking liberties). Besides, the book had an unprecedented number of unpublished cartoons from Charles Addams’ estate, along with character guidelines that he wrote for the unmatched 1964 TV series. True, it was more to coinside with The Addams Family: The Musical which would open on Broadway to great success just a month later, but you can’t argue with synergy. This might be, in part, due to an apparent lack of contemporary reprints – many were published during Addams’ lifetime, but there was a sharp decline after his untimely death in 1988.įortunately, Pomegranate Books decided to release T he Addams Family: An Evilution, written by H. Ironically, it seems nowadays that the most obscure part of the franchise are the very cartoons that Addams made as far back as 1938.

Halloween is almost upon us, so I might as well wrap up my whistle-stop tour over some of the less well-known aspects of Charles Addams’ delightfully creepy kin.

The addams family comic books