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Charles Addams' very first Addams Family comic strip -- or at least a proto-version of the Family -- appeared in the pages of the New Yorker in 1938. In the strip, a vampire-like woman stands next to a large, bearded, brutish man at the foot of a staircase in a haunted mansion. Bats fly overhead and spider webs adorn the light fixtures. A creepy third member of the family peers down through a railing high above. Standing at the door is an eager, white-suited vacuum cleaner salesman attempting to hawk his wares. "Vibrationless, noiseless, and a great time and back saver. No well-appointed home should be without it," the salesman says. He is unperturbed to be in a haunted house, and presses on with his sales pitch, even though the manse has clearly never been swept. 

Charles Addams would revisit these creepy characters regularly, eventually settling on a core cast of characters.

As detailed in Linda H. Davis' 2021 biography "Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life," the longtime illustrator for the New Yorker, famous for his ghastly, grim sense of humor, suffered a heart attack in 1988 while sitting in his own parked car. Addams' widow, Marilyn "Tee" Miller, pointed out shortly thereafter that her husband had always been a car enthusiast and that the location of his death was perfectly fitting. While Addams did have a ghoulish sensibility and a passion for the macabre -- he and Miller married in a pet cemetery -- he was, by all accounts, a gentle and silly man who looked more like a journalist than a mortician. Although he did have a coffee table that had been converted from an old embalming table. 

From Addams' hand came a glorious miasma of death and gallows humor that graced the pages of his publication from his first published strip in 1937 until his death 50 years later.

The Addams Family, when they first appeared on page nine of The New Yorker in 1938, were not named. The initial cartoon saw a gaunt Morticia-like woman and her towering beastly husband standing at the foot of a stairway in a dilapidated haunted house. A bat flies above, and there are spider webs in every corner. Lurking above them was some sort of ghoul. Their child? Addressing the monstrous couple was a determined vacuum cleaner salesman, clad in white, who states plainly that his product is "Vibrationless, noiseless, and a great time and back saver. No well-appointed home should be without it." The home was perhaps the least "well-appointed" imaginable.

The "family" soon began appearing in more and more strips in the New Yorker, until the members became more solidly codified. The gaunt matron remained the same, but her beastly husband became squat and lascivious. Their butler was more or less a Frankenstein monster,...