Ah, Charles Addams. Just the mention of his name has us humming and snapping our fingers for at least half the day. (Neat!) But his famous family is far from the only dark humor Addams submitted for public consumption. Mother Goose rhymes are something many of us remember from our childhood, whether read from a book or taught to us by grandmothers who tempered the somewhat disturbing ditties with a game of pat-a-cake soon after. Addams takes the traditional text and twists it by devising an image which takes the words to their natural visual conclusion. What’s inside Humpty Dumpty after he breaks? How do you get four-and-twenty black birds into a pie?
You know you’ve let your imagination wander beyond the seeming innocence of the Mother Goose world, see if Addams has beaten you to the punch.
From inside the front cover: Addams, master New Yorker cartoonist and black-humor prankster par excellence, has thrown tradition to the winds and taken matters into his own bedeviled hands, transforming those endearing Mother Goose characters into gleefully wicked and outrageous beings – from the farmer’s wife, seen sullenly cutting off the tails of those three blind mice with an electric knife, to Little Miss Muffet, scared half out of her mind by the size and leering grotesqueness of that spider that sat down beside her. “That clammy Addams touch never fails to hit its mark. In his macabre, funny way, he has given Mother Goose a dimension even she would shudder at – but only for a moment, because the wit and candor of it all are too irresistible and insanely comic to take exception to. Addams style and originality make his tampering with tradition completely and hilariously acceptable.” ~ Chicago Tribune

Price:  $16.00