There must be a special reason why Americans find Addams's stuff refreshing. Perhaps it is because the cartoons, which deal largely with family life, provide a healthy antidote to the saccharine treatment of the same subject in our advertisements and other forms of mass culture. After the depressingly cheerful families of the beer ads, the pious celebrations of marital bliss on the radio, the sentimental gushing over the kiddies everywhere except in the home, it is wonderfully relaxing to see these themes treated with a reverse twist, a bend sinister. Addams works this profitable vein with great diligence.

He also, of course, exploits the American public's peculiar, and in some ways rather frightening, fascination with violence. Just as the detective story, once an exercise in rational deduction, has become a pretext for the intimate description of extreme violence, just as the so-called comic books have more and more...