EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 29 © 2019 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

9 to. He was six feet one inch tall, and had a head made for caricature: big round nose, large ears, squinty eyes, thin lips, and whenever he smiled never showed his teeth, much to the delight and awe of children who thought he was toothless. Born Charles Samuel Addams in Westfield, New Jersey, in 1912, he had been known as “something of a rascal around his neighbourhood” as a child. He took to drawing early on, and did cartoons for his high school student literary magazine. Luckily for him, his father encouraged him to draw, and he attended Colgate University in 1929-30, and then the University of Pennsylvania in 1930-31 (where a Fine Arts building on campus was named after him and featured silhouettes of his Addams family characters in front of the building!). He then studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City between 1931-32. In 1933 he worked in the layout department of True Magazine , retouching the photos that accompanied the magazine’s stories (mainly by removing the blood from them). “A lot of those corpses were more interesting the way they were,” he complained. He had also managed to sell his first spot sketch to the New Yorker a year earlier, and from 1938 onwards his cartoons ran regularly in the magazine. During the Second World War he served at the Signal Corps Photographic Centre in New York, where he worked on animated training films for the U.S. Army. Among the many cartoons he did for the New Yorker , he came up with the series of single panel cartoons featuring members of a bizarre, and FACING PAGE: Noisy Neighbour , ink and wash on paper. Cartoon for The New Yorker , April 1951. It was this sort of gag that made Addams the darkest of cartoonists. ABOVE LEFT: “Did You Ever See Anyone so Changed as Poor Eustace? The Doctor Says It’s the Worst Case of Jaundice He’s Ever Seen” , ink and wash on paper. Cartoon for The New Yorker , May, 1937. ABOVE RIGHT: Skier , ink and wash on paper. Cartoon for The New Yorker , January 1949. Another variant on the skier gag.