Lately I've been really interested in The Addams Family as a transmedia property like the Archie comics. At first I'd only seen the Addams Family movies, but then I started going back and watching the TV show, and then finding the cartoons. I really love its style of humor and the way it "inverts" the values a typical American family would have.
One thing I find really interesting about the cartoons is that they're allowed to be a lot more morbid than the 60s TV show, or even the 90s movies at times. For example, there's one comic where Pugsley (the little boy) is dipping his arrows in poison with an evil grin on his face. There's nothing violent or bloody going on at that moment, but your mind connects the dots that the Pugsley is about to do something heinous. A lot of Charles Addams' pictures are like this, where nothing explicit is happening but the moment it clicks in your brain, you get a sick feeling in your stomach. Then you laugh.
I think that's part of what makes comic strip gags work, particularly one-panel gag strips. We're able to see a window into the world of the comic, but we can't turn our head and look in another view. We don't know anything about the characters or world besides what is presented to us. Everyone has an expectation about what a typical family or American life should be like. Charles Addams' cartoons are able to subvert those expectations and make us laugh at something disturbing or strange.
