Mr. Charles Addams, in a very high and broad album of drawings [Addams and Evil], supplies … [an] element native to The New Yorker, an element constantly and ferociously at variance with the observable universe. Some of the cartoons in the magazine are, as Mr. Gibbs in his introduction to Mr. Addams's book points out [see excerpt above], social criticism of the normal and orthodox variety; but others, and Mr. Addams's are among them, are "less a criticism of any local system than a total and melodramatic rearrangement of all life." Gothic has gone to the artist's head, and a rash of drawings of a haunted castle inhabited by a sinister half-breed, a ruined and haggard beauty, a child with six toes and a shambling gorilla-giant of a servant is the result. Mr. Addams is strongly attracted to witch-doctors and witch brews prepared on midnight heaths under a gibbous...