But then, it started to appear in the background of many of the family's scenes, such as this one ◊. It first appeared in this ◊ cartoon, unrelated to the family. They are shown visiting the family a lot. ◊ In the cartoon shown, they even have a baby, who looks exactly like both of them - in that it has two heads, which are exact copies of the parents'.

The 'Wall-Eyed Couple': A bald man with bulging eyes and a blank smile and a short woman with scraggly hair and a nervous smile.

Based on Cousin Itt from the TV show (see Canon Immigrant below), he only appeared in the one cartoon, but was subsequently depicted with the family in much of Addams's cover art.

A blonde girl with flowers in her hair ◊ appeared in a few cartoons and artwork, probably inspiring the character of Ophelia in the TV series.

For a general overview of all other works based off the cartoons, see here. In these cartoons, the characters didn't even have names they were just called 'the Addams family' because Charles Addams had created them. Note: this page is for the New Yorker cartoons with the recurring family characters, not the TV show, the movies, or any of the other adaptations and their tropes.

(You can read about the Elliotts, and see Addams' original illustration, in Bradbury's 2001 anthology From the Dust Returned.) The two men even talked about getting together for a full-length collaboration, but it sadly never came about. Eight years after Addams introduced his chararacters, the Elliotts debuted in a short story called 'Homecoming', first published in Mademoiselle with an illustration by Addams. If this family seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to Ray Bradbury's eldritch Elliotts, that's not an accident. These characters proved to be so popular that a 1960s TV sitcom was based off of them, and their popularity only grew from there. They were joined in subsequent cartoons by a father, a son, a daughter, a hinted-at-but-never-shown baby, a grandmother, and a recurring bald man whose relationship with the family was ambiguous, but became known as an uncle.

The first members of the family depicted were the mother, the butler, and the 'Thing', making their debut in this 1938 cartoon ◊. While these were standalone - and, typically, quite macabre - gag-a-week jokes, there were a few recurring characters: namely, a creepy family of loners who were dark opposites of the idealized American family. For many, many years, Charles Addams drew single-panel cartoons for The New Yorker.

Cartoon of the addams family