Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Addams, Charles (Samuel) - Lisle Bell

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LISLE BELL

If there is social significance in "Addams and Evil," the only thing to do is shudder and laugh it off. This can be done simultaneously. In a superb gallery of contented cretins, Charles Addams has gone about as far as imagination and wit can travel artistically in this direction—hovers diabolically on the macabre brink. What haunts us is not that these toads, vultures and vampires in subhuman form never have been bright since they were spawned out of the woodwork, but that they are so manifestly happy in a creepy sort of way….

[We] salute the artist who has a uniquely sardonic way of saying: People are fungi.

Lisle Bell, "Autumn Outburst of Cartoons," in New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, December 7, 1947, p. 7.∗

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1. Introduction
2. Boris Karloff
3. Time
4. Iris Barry
5. Wolcott Gibbs
6. William Germain Dooley
7. The Times Literary Supplement
8. Lisle Bell
9. Charles Poore
10. John Mason Brown
11. Lisle Bell
12. DWIGHT MacDONALD
13. Best Sellers
14. Russell Lynes
15. John Gruen
16. George A. Woods
17. Della Thomas
18. Zena Sutherland
19. Regina Minudri
20. John B. Breslin
21. A. J. Anderson
22. Copyright