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.
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