| Wednesday Addams made her début, along with the rest of the Addams Family, in The New Yorker, in 1938. But she’s still a teen-ager on Netflix, where the character is now the protagonist of her own series, “Wednesday,” which in just its first two weeks of release became the third most-watched program in the streamer’s history. A star-making turn for Jenna Ortega, the latest actress to play the role, this Wednesday lives in a world of smartphones and social media, but retains the deathly pale skin, black wardrobe, and comically macabre sensibilities that defined her from the start. In 1952, Charles Addams, the artist behind the Addams Family, painted the ghoulish clan on a hotel wall in the Hamptons, where he depicted Wednesday and her relatives looking amusingly out of place on a beach. In the decades that followed, the painting changed ownership and location several times, landing in obscurity in a “side foyer” in a library at Penn State University. The cartoonist Paul Karasik reported on its strange fate for the magazine, also highlighting aspects of Addams’s technique that accentuate the image’s dark comedy. “Even some faculty members who have taught at Penn State for decades don’t know it’s there,” Karasik wrote. “And it’s a masterpiece.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment