Two years after he began drawing his namesake family for The New Yorker, where he’d been publishing cartoons as a freelancer since his early 20s, Chas Addams introduced a child into his macabre world. Look beyond these key touch points, however, and you’ll see the gothic tween Wednesday Addams has changed, in ways subtle and extreme, over the more than 80 years we’ve known her. As yet another version and variety of the iconic child goth lands, this time as portrayed by Jenna Ortega, from the mind of Tim Burton on the new Netflix drama Wednesday, here’s a retrospective look across mediums at the ever-evolving Wednesday Addams. The only daughter of Gomez and Morticia Addams is pale with dark braids, wears a white collar atop an all-black outfit (sometimes accessorized with a handheld skull), and obsesses over the macabre while delighting in torturing (literally, usually) her younger brother, a lovable dummy in contrast with her deep-thinking sensitive soul. Of course, everyone already knows Wednesday Addams-at least, they think they do. “It tells you everything you need to know about her.” “It’s perfect,” Kevin Miserocchi, an old friend of Addams’s and now director of the Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, tells Vanity Fair of Wednesday’s unconventional moniker. While he struggled with some, like Pugsley (formerly “Pubert,” a crass impossibility for television in 1964), the name Wednesday-a nod to the child full of woe from the nursery rhyme-stuck from the moment of suggestion. Only as his imagined family was headed to television screens, did Addams name his characters.
For roughly a quarter of a century, Wednesday Addams was the sullen nameless daughter in a recurring New Yorker cartoon drawn by Charles “Chas” Addams.
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