For years, beginning in the 1930s, cartoonist Charles Addams delighted readers of the New Yorker with his macabre graphic fantasies. Among his most memorable creations was a ghoulish brood known as the Addams Family. On television and film, the creepy, kooky clan has seemed determined to live on in popular culture long after its patriarch departed the earthly plane in 1988.

Like all of Addams's work, the Addams Family feature played off the identification the audience made with the characters. In many ways, the Addams clan—father, mother, two children, and assorted relatives (all unnamed)—were like a typical American family. But their delight in their own fiendishness tickled the inner ghoul in everyone. In one of Addams's most famous cartoons, the family gleefully prepared to pour a vat of boiling liquid from the roof of their Gothic mansion onto Christmas carolers singing...