Contributor Jeff Nelson has made a fascinating discovery regarding some undeservedly obscure work by the great New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams. He writes:
Somebody has recently put a long run of the British weekly The Tatler on the Internet Archive. I've been browsing through it, and I was astonished to find a long run of Charles Addams cartoons which appeared in it from 1955-1957. I've done several web searches, and I can't find any indication that this has been documented anywhere.
For a little while I was overwhelmingly excited, thinking these to be completely lost and unknown Addams cartoons; but it didn't take long for me to realize that they are the same cartoons which appeared in his short-lived weekly syndicated panel Out of This World. Nevertheless, they are high res and high quality—in great contrast to the muddy, often borderline-legible versions of these cartoons which can be found in the online archives sourced from newspaper microfilms.
Between late 1955 and early 1957, New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams created a weekly black-and-white newspaper comic panel, Out of This World, for the McClure Syndicate. It would be reasonable for one to surmise that Out of This World was made up of cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. Addams thought highly enough of a good number of the cartoons from this strip to include them in his collection Nightcrawlers (1957).
The run was sixty-five cartoons, according to H. Kevin Miserocchi, of the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation, in a comment he left on Ink Spill in 2021. Maybe so, but the panel strip spanned seventy-five weeks in The Tatler and Bystander. Whatever the case, the fifty-one Addams cartoons Jeff has provided for us represent a majority of the total run. They are shown here as they appeared in print on a full magazine page above the "Roundup" column.
Those cartoons that were eventually published in Nightcrawlers have the page number from that collection noted on the lower right.
All cartoons are copyright the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation.
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 36 |
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Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 14 |
Like Esquire in the U.S., The Tatler, as seen above, often did not end its captions with a period.
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 20 |
The Bishop's Crook lamppost illuminating the above scene was made of cast iron. It was introduced in New York around 1900. What did readers of The Tatler make of that?
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 90 |
The original art for the above dog-walking cartoon was sold in 2022. The sale is discussed in the blog archives here. The Out of This World cartoon is dated October 23, 1955, a Sunday. The Tatler issue is dated three days later on Wednesday.
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 86 |
The original art for this splendid cartoon, "I'll bet he wants to borrow something," was sold at Heritage Auctions in 2023. That's recorded in the archives as well, here. The artwork, incidentally bears a release date of Sunday, November 6, 1955. This time, The Tatler is dated November 2, the preceding Wednesday. In other words, The Tatler apparently did not always publish the Addams cartoons in exact order, for whatever reason.
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 84 |
According to Mr. Miserocchi's comment on the Ink Spill post of September 24, 2021, the above "It does give him a certain incentive" cartoon is one of many from Out of This World in the collection of the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation. It, and presumably others in this category, have been loaned to various exhibitions.
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 64 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 68 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 26 |
The above pawprints cartoon has a visible patch on which Addams placed his signature in white on black.
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Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 93
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Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 29
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Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 94
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 58 |
In the above cartoon, Addams repurposes his familiar boy-in-a-striped-shirt character, later to be known as Pugsley, in a non-Addams Family setting.
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 91 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 31 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 60 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 95 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 54 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 76 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 24 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 80 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 78 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 61 |
This is just brilliant. Addams may have recalled this booby trap setup in 1957 when he created the poster art for the movie How to Murder a Rich Uncle. The two designs share a rigged shotgun and cutaway views through the walls.
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 90 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 72 |
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| Nightcrawlers (1957), p. 44 |
Note: Again, the above cartoons are copyright the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation. The website of the Foundation currently does not mention Out of This World.
My thanks to Jeff Nelson for advancing our knowledge of Charles Addams's long-neglected Out of This World panel strip through these pages out of The Tatler from seven decades past. This is his fourteenth contribution to the blog, a number that underestimates his importance here.
Out of This World was discusseded on Michael Maslin's Ink Spill in 2021 here. The above citation about the number of strips that exist comes from H. Kevin Miserocchi in the comment section of the post. This Ink Spill piece shows two newspaper panels, one of which is not a part of the group shown here from The Tatler.
Out-of-print copies of Nightcrawlers are widely available. Other Addams collections are wonderful too.
Jeff was right about this information being new to the internet. I don't like to use AI, but here's what Google gave me anyway just two hours before posting:
In one sense, AI must be just like me: it doesn't know how to use the Internet Archive.
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