The Strange Life of the Man Who Created “The Addams Family”

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Charles Addams, the creator of The Addams Family,  was a strange bird.  Although Addams had a normal childhood, his cartoons hinted at a darker side…

 …Instead of a standard coffee table, Addams used a Civil War-era embalming table. He also kept a collection of antique crossbows above his sofa, and he used a young girl’s tombstone (“Little Sarah, Aged Three”) as a perch for his cocktails…

Addams married two different women who looked like the character Morticia from his cartoons (and his second wife even had her nose fixed to look more like the character).  Addams married his third wife in a pet cemetery.

Over the course of his career…

“Addams illustrated 68 covers for The New Yorker and contributed more than 1,300 cartoons to the magazine” — His most popular creation the comic strip The Addams Family “spawned two live-action television series, two animated cartoons, and two blockbuster feature films.”

Surprisingly The Addams Family  tv show got his cartoons banned from The New Yorker and after his divorce his second wife controlled the rights to the tv series.

You get the full details of Addams interesting life if you click over to the very interesting piece Light Heart; Dark Humor: The Man Behind The Addams Family  by Bill DeMain at Neatorama.

Q & A with John Carpenter!

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I’ve been a John Carpenter fan since his classic Halloween.  Then when VHS came out I was able to go back and see Assault on Precinct 13  [which I prefer to the two].

Carpenter went on to do Escape from New York,  The Thing  and so many other cool films.  Somewhere along the way the lighting escaped the bottle.

Carpenter has the best attitude about his career, his life and his legacy.  I’d love to see him return to Snake Plissken with Kurt Russell one more time.

That’s not likely and Carpenter doesn’t talk about it in this interview, but he does talk about a lot and the interview is more than worth a read.

Source: Deadline.

James O’Barr: “The Crow” and Much More

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Sean CW Korsgaard posted a great interview with The Crow creator James O’Barr.

O’Barr discusses what got him on board the new Crow movie [O’Barr hated and had nothing to do with the sequels and was against a new Crow film]…

…We’re not remaking the movie, we’re readapting the book. My metaphor is that there is a Bela Lugosi Dracula and there’s a Francis Ford Coppola Dracula, they use the same material, but you still got two entirely different films. This one’s going to be closer to Taxi Driver or a John Woo film, and I think there’s room for both of them…

a new Crow comic that O’Barr is writing and drawing called The Engines of Despair…

…features a woman who was killed on her wedding day and comes back for revenge…

…a war comic…

…It’s a true war story from the Korean War, about a group of Marines – I was in the Marines, and I’d heard about this group called “the real 300″, Fox Company, 235 of them held a mountaintop in Korea for five days against thousands of well-armed Chinese troops in subzero temperatures. Unlike the Spartans, against all odds, they held the mountain, and 82 of them lived to tell the tale…

…and a pet project O’Barr has been working on called Sundown…

…it’s a gothic spaghetti-western that I’ve been working on for about five years in my spare time. It’s following four characters, each on a journey across post-Civil War America, each have different motives, goals and back stories, and Sundown is like any good story, about their journeys, not their destination. I’d describe it as theWizard of Oz if it had been directed by Sergio Leone…

Korsgaard’s O’Barr interview is really well done and I recommend it to all.

Mike Torrance and Snaps

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Mike Torrance aka The Krayola Kidd is back and he’s brought Angelo “Snaps” Provolone with him!

Over the coming weeks/months I’ll be posting more of Mike’s sketch card commissions.  My goal is to eventually get a card for every character Sly has played.  We’re well on our way!

You can see more of Mike’s art at his Deviant Art site. Mike is available for commissions and his prices are very reasonable.