Stranger than Strange: Gold Key’s Addams Family Comics of the 1970s

I am a massive Addams Family fan. Have been since I was a kid, probably long before I understood why a family of cheerful ghouls living in a decaying mansion was so funny, so strange, and so weirdly aspirational. So when I stumbled across these three Gold Key comics in the 1990s — right in the middle of that glorious Addams Family renaissance kicked off by the Barry Sonnenfeld films — I snapped them up without hesitation. Two movies in theaters, a generation rediscovering Gomez and Morticia, and here were these quirky little comics sitting in a bargain bin, largely ignored. Lucky me.

What I found was a short-lived but genuinely charming run: three issues, published between late 1974 and early 1975, adapting episodes of the 1973 Hanna-Barbera animated series. They weren’t dark. They weren’t edgy. They were, frankly, kids’ comics in the most honest sense of the phrase. And I loved them anyway.

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The Addams Family Comics: A Brief History of Gold Key’s Three-Issue Run

From New Yorker Cartoons to Saturday Morning TV to the Spinner Rack

Before we get into the comics themselves, a bit of context helps. Charles Addams invented the family in The New Yorker in the 1930s — a collection of single-panel gag cartoons featuring a clan of politely monstrous people who found death, decay, and general ghoulishness to be perfectly normal. From those inky, shadow-drenched panels came the iconic 1964 ABC live-action sitcom, and then, in 1973, a Hanna-Barbera animated series that aired on NBC.

The 1973 cartoon is… a different beast. Gone is most of the sinister undercurrent. In its place: a brightly coloured, cheerfully macabre family of good-natured weirdos travelling America in a creepy Victorian-style camper, blundering into trouble mostly because normal society can’t handle them. It’s Saturday-morning television, which means it’s safe, silly, and structured around the same basic joke repeated eight ways. I say that with affection.

Western Publishing — the company behind the Gold Key imprint — held a raft of Hanna-Barbera licenses throughout the 1960s and 70s. The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, Space Ghost, Valley of the Dinosaurs — if it was on Saturday morning TV, Gold Key probably had a comic for it. Their general editorial policy under longtime editor Chase Craig was practical and sensible: adapt actual TV episodes, since the studio had already approved the plots. The Addams Family comics followed that template to the letter.

Three issues. October 1974 through April 1975. Standard 32-page Gold Key format, 25 cents a pop, full colour throughout. And while they are technically tie-in comics for a cartoon that was already adapting a TV show that was itself adapting a newspaper cartoon — yes, it’s that many layers deep — they hold the curious distinction of being the first dedicated Addams Family comic-book series published in a standard U.S. comic-book format. Which is a strange thing when you think about it. The Addamses originated in a comic format (single-panel gags, but still), and yet it took until 1974 for them to get actual comic books.

Some copies you’ll find carry Whitman branding alongside the Gold Key logo, or instead of it. This reflects Western Publishing’s mid-70s distribution shift toward Whitman-branded newsstand and bagged-set distribution — a quirk of the era rather than any meaningful editorial difference. Same comics, different sticker.

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The Creators: Bill Ziegler and the Mystery Writers

All three issues were drawn — pencils and inks both — by Bill Ziegler, a veteran of Dell and Gold Key who also worked on newspaper strips including Mary Worth. His art style here is clean, readable, and thoroughly on-model with the Hanna-Barbera character designs. Don’t expect Charles Addams’ scratchy, shadowy grotesques. What you get instead is bright, flat animation art translated into comics form — bold outlines, simplified backgrounds, faces that look like they could be production cels. For what this was (a licensed kids’ comic adapting a kids’ cartoon), it works beautifully. Ziegler was a professional in the most reliable sense: he delivered work that was clear, well-paced, and genuinely fun to look at page after page.

There’s one delightful in-joke worth flagging. In issue #2, Ziegler slipped a caricature of Charles Addams himself into the background as a toll booth officer — identifiable by that distinctive long nose. It’s a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it touch that suggests at least some awareness, if not affection, for where all of this ultimately came from.

Lettering on issues #1 and #3 was handled by Bill Spicer (with a degree of uncertainty on the third issue per comics historian records). Issue #2 used typeset lettering, which was unusual for comics at the time but not unheard of at Western.

The writers, however, are officially uncredited in all three issues. The Grand Comics Database and various heritage auction records point vaguely toward Mark Evanier — who did work extensively for Gold Key and later ran Hanna-Barbera’s comics division — as a series-level credit. Evanier himself has been clear that he did not write issue #1, and his own Gold Key checklist omits the series entirely. Whether he wrote #2, #3, or any of them remains unresolved. The scripts may well have been handled anonymously by Western staffers working directly from the television scripts, which is consistent with Gold Key’s general approach to licensed adaptations. The mystery, honestly, adds a bit of charm.

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Issue #1 — In Search of the Boola-Boola (October 1974)

Adapts: “Boola Boola” — Season 1, Episode 3 of the animated series (aired September 22, 1973)

The Addams Family hits the road. Specifically, they pile into their magnificent rolling mansion of a camper and head to the Florida Everglades, because Wednesday has read about the Boola-Boola: an extremely rare, extremely extinct creature that she absolutely must have as a pet. The family, being who they are, sees nothing remotely unusual about this ambition.

In Miami, they hire a pet shop owner to help locate the creature. What they don’t know is that two local con men — eyeing Gomez Addams’ obvious wealth and near-total obliviousness to normal social conventions — have hatched a scheme. They kidnap Ocho, Wednesday’s octopus (this is the animated series, so yes, she has a pet octopus), disguise it as a Boola-Boola, and attempt to sell it back to the Addamses for a fortune.

Here is the problem with trying to scam the Addams Family: reality keeps working against you. Wednesday and Pugsley, blundering cheerfully through the swamp, actually find a real Boola-Boola. The con men’s scheme falls apart in stages. The family — completely ignorant that any of this is a scam — nearly pays the pet shop owner a small fortune out of sheer gratitude for, technically, having their octopus available for purchase. The crooks, battered by a rotating cast of monstrous animals and gleefully lethal children, eventually cut their losses and flee, vowing never again to tangle with anyone this comprehensively strange.

There’s a gentle extra beat at the end: Wednesday discovers the Boola-Boola is a mother with a nest of young waiting for her in the swamp, and in a moment of uncharacteristic softness, lets her go. It’s a sweet note for a character who, in this animated incarnation, is considerably less homicidal than her later portrayals. She’s still bizarre, still obsessed with things that would horrify a normal child, but there’s a warmth to her here that I’ve always found oddly endearing.

The whole issue functions as a series of gags built around the Addamses’ complete normality within their own context — and the world’s complete inability to process that normality. It’s light, it’s funny, and Ziegler’s art gives it a warm, almost storybook quality.

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Issue #2 — The Addams Family Falls in Love with Central Park (January 1975)

Adapts: “The Addams Family in New York” — Season 1, Episode 1 of the animated series

The road trip continues, and this time it’s New York City. Two con men — named, brilliantly, Benny and Mr. Ripoff — spot Gomez arriving in the city and immediately start scheming. Their plan: sell him things that are not theirs to sell.

It starts with the Museum of Natural History. Gomez, wandering through the exhibits, finds a diorama featuring Van Dyke Addams, an ancestor who apparently helped purchase Manhattan from the Lenape people. He’s delighted. Benny and Mr. Ripoff, sensing opportunity, offer to sell him the museum itself. Gomez buys it. Then they offer him Central Park. Gomez buys that too.

Now, here’s the thing about trying to scam Gomez Addams: the man is relentlessly literal and completely sincere. He owns Central Park now, as far as he’s concerned, and he intends to be a responsible owner. The family moves in. They flood sections of it, dig a moat, release zoo animals into the general park area, and begin transforming Midtown Manhattan’s most beloved green space into something resembling a haunted bayou.

When the police arrive to arrest the family for comprehensive property destruction, Gomez produces what turns out to be a legitimate ancestral deed — his family really does have a historical claim to the land. The authorities, faced with a paradox they have no legal framework to address, essentially beg the Addamses to please leave New York and take their moat with them.

Benny and Mr. Ripoff are, once again, undone by the sheer improbability of the Addams family existing. The issue is breezier than the first — more slapstick, less plot — but there’s something genuinely funny about Gomez’s absolute conviction that he has simply purchased a lovely park and intends to improve it. He’s not malicious. He’s enthusiastic. The comic captures that particular brand of chaos beautifully.

(A quick note on historical logic: Central Park obviously didn’t exist in 1626, and Powhatan was a Virginia chief, not a Manhattan one. The comic does not trouble itself with these details. Neither should you.)

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Issue #3 — Left in the Lurch (April 1975)

Adapts: “Left in the Lurch” — Season 1, Episode 2 of the animated series

The third and final issue is the strongest of the three, and the one I find myself returning to most often. It gives us something the first two don’t quite manage: a character story. Specifically, a Lurch story.

Lurch, the Addams Family butler, has been maintaining a correspondence with a teenage pen pal named Bobby Joe, who lives near Nashville. And Lurch, in the grip of what can only be described as a catastrophic crush, has been… embellishing his situation. In his letters, he is a famous rock star. A musician of renown and considerable charisma. This is, obviously, not entirely accurate.

The family’s road trip is heading toward Nashville, which means Lurch is about to be exposed. His response to this threat is wonderfully unhinged. He tries to sabotage the trip. He commits minor crimes, apparently hoping to get arrested. He eventually breaks into a jail and assigns himself to a cell, which is exactly the sort of problem-solving you’d expect from a man of his particular disposition.

None of it works. The family — particularly Gomez, who is nothing if not a romantic — is determined to help Lurch save face. The solution: the entire Addams Family will pose as Freddie and the Frogs, a rock band, with Lurch as their lead performer. Gomez sings offstage. Lurch mimes. Grandmama presumably does something alarming on an instrument.

Bobby Joe is smitten. The performance is, by the standards of the story’s internal logic, a success. And then Lurch gets a sore throat and admits he won’t be able to continue his musical career, and Bobby Joe — revealed to be magnificently fickle — immediately moves on.

The comic ends with the Addamses back in their creepy camper, rolling on down the road. Lurch is no worse off than he started. The family, characteristically, considers this a triumph.

It’s also the last issue. No fourth comic ever came. The series ended here, quietly, with the Addams Family driving into the sunset.

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A Few Final Thoughts on the Series as a Whole

These comics are, by any objective measure, slight. They’re children’s entertainment adapted from children’s television, and they don’t pretend otherwise. The horror is decorative. The darkness is strictly ornamental — Wednesday’s guillotine gags, Pugsley’s various nefarious schemes, the parade of monsters and traps, all rendered bloodless and bouncy. Fans of Charles Addams’ original, genuinely sinister New Yorker work will find this a considerable distance from the source.

But.

I’ve always loved this version of the family — the animated series and by extension these comics — for exactly what they are: a portrayal of the Addamses as genuinely good people who happen to terrify everyone around them through sheer cheerful weirdness. Gomez is generous to a fault. Morticia is gracious and warm (and yes, she and Gomez are considerably more restrained in their affections here than in the films or the original sitcom — these are kids’ comics, after all). Fester is a gleeful mad scientist inventor. Lurch, free from the constraints of being a mostly non-speaking background presence, is hilariously verbose. Wednesday is strange and wonderful. Pugsley is, in his own sweet way, downright evil.

Finding these three issues in the 1990s — when the Addams Family movies had suddenly made the whole property fashionable again, when Addams Family Values had just reminded everyone that this franchise could be genuinely brilliant — felt like finding a secret passage in a wall I’d walked past a hundred times. Three quietly charming comics, thirty pages each, Bill Ziegler’s clean and affectionate art throughout, and enough of the family’s essential strangeness intact to make them worth every cent I paid.

A small thing. But a good one.

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