In the cover for this year’s Cartoon Issue, Harry Bliss pays homage to Charles Addams, whose macabre work routinely appeared in The New Yorker, and whose most famous creation, the Addams Family, has spurred countless adaptations. We recently talked to Bliss about discovering Addams and his life as a cartoonist.
What made you want to be a cartoonist?
I wanted to be a painter. My training was academic: drawing from plaster casts, color theory, sculpture, anatomy, etc. But then I rediscovered the depth of Charles Addams’s work. I had loved his work as a child, when I was a class clown, but as an adult I marvelled at his terrific artistic skill. I had an epiphany of sorts: I could meld the beauty of Addams’s renderings with my desire to make people laugh. That turned me into a cartoonist.
