Number 2228: Hanna-Barbera’s Addams Family

I am a fan of Charles Addams and the cartoons he drew for The New Yorker. I watched the sixties television show when it debuted, but had not heard of the 1973 Saturday morning cartoon series by Hanna-Barbera until I ran across the Gold Key Hanna-Barbera Addams Family comic book. What I found out is it’s an adaptation of the first episode of the Hanna-Barbera series. It is drawn by Bill Ziegler, a longtime comics professional who worked on comic strips (Mary Worth, for one), and had done a lot of work for Dell, then Gold Key.

Of course, animated cartoons made for Saturday morning television will never have the insinuation of the bizarre and horrible like Addams’s originals.

I am glad he chose to show the scene before the action, rather than after.
Something I noticed immediately in the comic book is the officer at the toll booth is a caricature of Addams. Addams had a very distinctive long nose. It tells me artist Ziegler may have known Addams.

To me this comic book is more of a curiosity, although if I were a youngster watching the animated series I probably wouldn’t know Charles Addams’s work. And despite the lightened tone of the comic book, removing it far from its original inspiration, Addams didn’t have any problems signing the checks he got for projects like this. He led a lifestyle of the rich and famous, even though he was not especially rich, just (in)famous. Having a collection of rare sports cars and hanging out with folks like Jackie Kennedy took a lot of $$$.

From Hanna-Barbera The Addams Family #2 (1975):

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