Charles Addams cartoon collections
Homebodies
Chas Addams Half-Baked Cookbook

                                             (Simon And Schuster)  

     Homebodies  (1954)   88 full-page black-&-white cartoons with two color pieces on the endpapers in my standard size hardback edition.  Do note that there was also a much smaller edition from Pocket Books put out in standard paperback size which pales in comparison.  Get the larger book.  Most of this collection came from the magazine The New Yorker.  There are two multi-image sequential 'strips' as well.  The subject matter is indeed mostly the weird or macabre.


     Chas Addams Half-Baked Cookbook  (2005)   This has the appearance of being another collection of recipes, this time with a cartoonish twist, but in reality, not that many pages are given over to the recipes.  This is a smaller book, 7.5-by-9.5 inches, 112 pages with 83 full-page draw cartoons, a six-page introduction and another 11 chapter-fronts & interstitial pages (so you can do the math . . .).  The major disappointment here, is that a little less than half of the cartoons are his familiar style, but then all the rest are artistically very rough & sketchy - maybe they were just found discarded ideas that didn't pass muster and weren't ultimately going to be taken to a finishing stage, but they look all the world like a celebrity artist at the end of his career without the finesse he once had and could then only manage large strokes & broad washes.



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