Nightcrawlers [Night Crawlers]

128 pp. A collection of cartoons by the creator of The Addams Family. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: "Charles Samuel Addams (7 January 1912 - 29 September 1988) was an American cartoonist known for his particularly black humor and macabre characters. Some of the recurring characters, who became known as The Addams Family, became the basis for two live-action television series, two cartoon series, and three motion pictures. His cartoons regularly appeared in The New Yorker, and he also created a syndicated comic strip, Out of This World, which ran in 1956. There are many collections of his work, including Drawn and Quartered (1942) and Dear Dead Days (1959). Typical of his work, one cartoon shows two men standing in a room labeled "Patent Attorney.' One is pointing a bizarre gun out the window toward the street and saying, 'Death ray, fiddlesticks! It doesn't even slow them up!' He drew more than 1,300 cartoons over the course of his life. Those that didn't appear in The New Yorker were often in Collier's and TV Guide. In 1961, Addams received, from the Mystery Writers of America, a Special Edgar Award for his body of work. His cartoons appeared in books, calendars and other merchandising. Singer-guitarist Dean Gitter's 1957 recording, Ghost Ballads (Riverside, RLP 12-636), folk songs with supernatural themes, was packaged with album art by Addams showing a haunted house. The 'Family' beloved of New Yorker readers was originally created in collaboration with Addams' close friend Ray Bradbury. The two had planned to create a book of the Family's complete history with Addams illustrations, but it never materialized. Bradbury's stories about the 'Elliott Family' were finally anthologized in From The Dust Returned in October 2001, with a connecting narrative and an explanation of his work with Addams, and an intricately drawn Addams wraparound cover. Addams collected crossbows and used a little girl's tombstone for a coffee table, but Janet Maslin, in a review of an Addams biography for The New York Times, wrote, 'Addams persona sounds cooked up for the benefit of feature writers... was at least partly a character contrived for the public eye', noting that one outré publicity photo showed the humorist wearing a suit of armor at home, 'but the shelves behind him hold books about painting and antiques, as well as a novel by John Updike.' Addams was born in Westfield, New Jersey, the son of Grace M. (née Spears) and Charles Huy Addams. He had a happy, sociable, perhaps somewhat bland childhood there, providing few clues as to the macabre character of his humor. He was 'known as something of a rascal around the neighborhood' and 'there was always a little group of boys at his house, doing things,' as childhood friends recalled. There were a few, but not many, forebodings of dark oddity to come during his childhood: His nickname was 'Chill', and a chalk drawing of a skeleton in the garage behind one of the homes his family lived in at the time is said to have been drawn by him. That house at 552 Elm Street (now a local landmark), and another on Dudley Avenue in which police once caught him breaking into, are said to be the inspiration for the Addams family mansion in his cartoons (though scholars have pointed to a three-way resemblance among the Addams Family mansion, the house in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and the Victorian building depicted in Edward Hopper's 'House by the Railroad'). He was fond of visiting the Presbyterian Cemetery on Mountain Avenue. One friend said of him, 'His sense of humor was a little different from everybody else's'. He was also artistically inclined, 'drawing with a happy vengeance' according to a biographer. Before graduating from Westfield High School in 1929, he drew many cartoons for the Weathervane student newspaper. Addams studied at Colgate University and at the University of Pennsylvania where a fine-arts building on campus is named for him. In front of the building is a sculp