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WARNING: Contains discussions and images of cartoon violence and suicide.

The Addams family does a lot of morbid stuff, especially in the modern movies I'm most familiar with, to the point where it doesn't make a lot of sense unless they are undead, cus they'd prolly be dead right now if they had this many close calls. (And it's been a while since I saw them, but I think it's heavily implied that they are.)

The original Addams family cartoons generally feel a lot tamer than the movies, but I dunno if they really are or if it's simply a quirk of the medium.

The thing about one-panel comics that's the secret ingredients of Charles Addams unique morbid style is you can set up scenarios that would end really badly, but you never have to follow through with it, cus you exhausted your one (1) panel.

This can allow a comic to have surprisingly dark humor, and it won't feel as bleak as it would in a medium with more of an expectation of continuity.

The Addams family movies have similar close brushes with death as in Addams' comics, but because there's continuity and recurring characters and that raises the question of "shouldn't they all be dead by now?" a lot more than in the comics, where we're conditioned to see each panel as a disconnected vignette.

Worth mentioning here is that most of the doomed Charles Adddams characters are one-shots, the family themselves, when they show up, tend to not get involved in too many dark shenanigans, mostly they are just implied to be goths, with occult interests that scares the normies around them.

The vocabulary for talking about this aspect of the medium sort of evolved by accident when Gary Larson noticed that people where having a much more negative reaction to one of his comics where two dogs where playing thetherball with a cat.

He theorized that part of what made that comic seem darker than intended is that there's no resolution. As far as you know, the dog never stops batting the cat around. And thus, this phenomenon, where audiences will passively assume that the situation will go on indefinitely if we don't see it resolve is called the thethercat effect.

I'm gonna call what happens in some Charles Addams comics the reverse thethercat effect, cus it's basically the same logic, only operating in reverse. If a character is standing on a stool with a noose around their neck, but when never see them drop, there's no evidence that they ever did.

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There's this interesting comic stip edit called "3eanuts", in which the last panel of a Peanuts strip is edited away.

This turns the comic into a sort of low-key, existensialist nightmare. In a typical Peanuts comic, the first three panels will have the characters approach some emotional struggle and in the last panel say something that weakly cuts the tension. Without the last panel, the tone of the comic changes subtly, though for me at least, it's a cumulative effect.

When people talk about this project, they really play up how bleak it is, but there are actually relatively few comics that follow a format like "Charlie Brown: I am depressed, I hate my life, I want to die, j/k".

Mostly it just turns Peanuts into a world of unresolved conflicts, defeats and hanging questions, and that wears on you after a while.

Peanuts is famous for being a comic strip with a dark heart, and 3eanut really exposes the trick: the first three panels edges up on existensial terror, and the third panel defuses the tension without actually resolving the underlying dread. The result is a comic with an air of barely concealed depression that somehow still superficially feels like a happy go lucky newspaper comic.

When you remove the third panel, your mind fills in the blank with what the first three panels actually imply, and the result is a much darker conclusion than what actually happens. (amusingly enough, there are some Peanuts comics that follow the reverse formula, where the last panel adds an edge to what would otherwise be a wholesome scene.)

The point im getting at is that what actually happens in a story has less of a bearing on how dark it feels than how it is presented, and in particular to what extent the audience have been conditioned by the genre or the medium to expect the natural conclusion to a morbid scenario.

"Now I'm wondering if anyone's taken Family Circus and added three panels of another comic to the beginning to make it funnier." -- my girlfriend.