Who created The Addams Family? Comic origins and history explored

The Addams Family packs a power punch of nostalgia, be it their creepy and kooky theme song or mysterious and spooky shenanigans. The weird family ruled the television and the silver screen with their successful TV shows and movies, both animated and live-action. However, many young fans are clueless about the family’s history and origin.

The creepy family living in the haunted house had their humble beginnings in 1938 on the comic panel of The New Yorker. Created by the talented cartoonist Charles Addams, the first artwork saw a salesman trying to sell a vacuum cleaner to the residents of the haunted mansion, who seemed as creepy as their house.

Charles Addams designed the Addams family as the stark contrast of a perfect American family with ghastly elements. An earlier single-panel comic in The New Yorker saw the residents of the haunted manor find happiness in unpleasant things. From decorating a dead tree for Christmas to borrowing a cup of cyanide from neighbors, the gags were loved by the readers.

Throughout his career as a Cartoonist, Charles drew more than 1300 carton strips and panels in The New Yorker, out of which only 58 of them were of the creepy family. At a time when newspapers were the primary source of entertainment, Charles’s Addams Family both spooked and amused the readers.

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The Addams Family includes Parents Gomez, Morticia, Kids Pugsley, Wednesday, and more.

While the characters of the family were introduced through the comic panel, they stayed anonymous until the first television show in 1964. The show was well received by viewers and, to date, has a cult following. The dark undertones of the comics were replaced with more upbeat, family-friendly gags. Talking about the show, Author Stephen Cox said:

“The TV show wasn’t as dark as the strips, it was more zany than spooky, but it captured the flavor of what Charles Addams was doing in the New Yorker.”

Members of the Addams Family include the father, Gomez Addams, the eccentric patriarch of the Gomez household who is very much in love with his skinny, pale-skinned, almost dead-eyed wife, Morticia.

The kids in the household are Wednesdays, who, just like her mother, have an air of melancholy around her, and her enthusiastic younger brother Pugsley, whose curiosity always gets the better of him. Uncle Fester, who has a penchant for antics, is a member of the creepy family. Fester was originally the brother of Morticia Addams but was later retconned as the brother of Gomez.

Other family members are Grandmama, Gomez’s mother, who is often seen performing witchcraft and playing with potions, a dismembered hand named Thing, a butler Lurch with an uncanny resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster, and a hairy gibberish-speaking being named Cousin Itt.

What began as a single comic panel on page nine of The New Yorker that earned the artist a sum of 85 dollars is now multi-million-dollar intellectual property. The comic has multiple TV shows and feature films under its name, including numerous appearances in animated cartoons of Hanna-Barbera.

The family will soon find their new home on Netflix with the release of a show titled Wednesday. Tim Burton will helm the horror-comedy series produced by MGM as executive producer and director of 4 out of 8 episodes. The Burtonesque series is the perfect art style for the series and seems to be inspired by the creator Charles Addams himself.

The series featuring the Addams Family will be released in late 2022 and stars Luis Guzmán as Gomez, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia, Jenna Ortega as Wednesday, and Isaac Ordonez as Pugsley.