I just started to read the biography of Charles Addams by Linda Davis, and it brings me memories of being a fan of his work when I was a child. I'm trying to figure out how I got into him before the TV series "The Addams Family." I liked the Addams Family, but I was more of a fan of his other stuff. Such as his work in the office working world and just the everyday absurdity of life played out in Addams' mind and drawings. It seems he was a boyfriend to Greta Garbo and quite a ladies' man. I have been reading up on the playboys of the western world for decades ago. I'm attracted to that world because I don't feel I have ever participated in that landscape. I'm one of those fellows who sees a girl, and my technique is to wait for them to approach me. I figured if I sat there long enough, eventually, they would notice me.
I did a lot of that in High School, and if you find the right spot, you can sit there and wait. The school was never a significant interest for me, except for the quad steps that lead to the lunch area because that is where you will meet people. The girls I met a school were and still are important to me. I do keep in contact with some, but there are some that I lost touch with, and it seems no one knows where they are or if they even exist on this planet. There is a danger in looking back because one doesn't see the luggage that comes with it.
So, yeah, Charles Addams. As a music lover, there is a cartoon where the Receptionist for a business notices at 5 pm that the little musicians leave to go home from their muzak studio on the office wall. It reminds me of a kid watching Lassie on TV, and my dog Rover would bark at Lassie on the small screen. He also went to the back of the TV set to see if there was an opening to get inside the set. For my dog, that was logical thinking. It was the first time I noticed an animal thinking logically about a situation. There's a dog in the box, and therefore…
Addams caught those moments with The Addams Family and others in his work. It's like starting on ground zero and then using your knowledge to understand what's happening. There is something very Wittgenstein about Charles Addams.
My mother and my Aunt Dearborn both subscribed to The New Yorker almost since it was founded in 1925. So did my Godmother, Alice. They were all heavily into the Algonquin Round Table, and always talked about it, but even before I could properly read, I was into the cartoons. Charles Addams & Peter Arno were my favorites. This was back in the mid '50s. Pocket Books released a series of 6 collections of Addams' cartoons in mass market paperback format, and I bought and read and reread those. I still have them.
When the TV series started, I adored that too, even though it made a significant change to the universe of the cartoons. The characters in the cartoons were almost universally malevolent, and there were few signs of any romantic attachment between the characters who the series would name Gomez & Morticia. Yet, that romance was one of the things that made the series so special. Gomez & Morticia were the 1st couple on US TV who looked like they slept together. The entire family loved and accepted each other. They acknowledged and reveled in their differences from the normies, unlike the hapless Munsters who didn't even seem to realize that they were different, but they didn't look down on the normies. I identified a lot with Gomez because he was very outgoing and I took after both of my parents in being very outgoing. We'd be fine going up to any random person and starting a conversation. This has annoyed some of my girlfriends, who accused me (with some justification) of flirting with waitresses.