A Charles Addams Mystery Solved: Two Cartoon Quartet Ads

On Halloween I had the privilege of posting Joel Jacobus's images of a scrapbook of vintage Charles Addams cartoons from The New Yorker. At the end of the scrapbook was a bit of a mystery, a small clipped Addams drawing not from The New Yorker with the caption ...slow heating up? without quotation marks. Was it an obscure gag cartoon or a fragment of an advertisement?

...slow heating up?
Charles Addams

Well, now we know. Yesterday, Jeff Nelson came forward with the 1957 advertisement from the Saturday Evening Post that included this Addams art as well as art by three other New Yorker cartoonists: Claude Smith, William Steig, and Richard Taylor. The product is Housepower, an electrical industry-sponsored group promoting solutions to the common problems of inadequate household wiring and outlets.

Charles Addams        Claude Smith
William Steig           Richard Taylor
Somebody ought to tell them about full Housepower
The Saturday Evening Post, March 16, 1957, page 82

There's a bonus too. Jeff also has found an earlier ad for Sanforized shirts—they don't shrink in water—dated 1953 with a very similar format. Three of the cartoonists are the same, even their positions on the page are the same, but Ed Nofziger is there where Claude Smith would later be. Perhaps the same advertising agency was behind both these pages.

Charles Addams           Ed Nofziger
William Steig           Richard Taylor
Advertisement for Sanforized shirts
The Saturday Evening Post, August 22, 1953, page 46

Note:  My thanks go to Joel Jacobus for providing the Addams scrapbook cartoon mystery and to Jeff Nelson for solving it.

The full Halloween post about the Charles Addams scrapbook may be seen here.

Take advantages of the wisdom of crowds. If you've got a cartoon mystery concerning a New Yorker cartoonist, perhaps Attempted Bloggery can help solve it. You never know.

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