Charles Addams' very first strip in what might be considered the Addams Family series ran on August 6, 1938 in the pages of the New Yorker. The strip features a large, bearded, brutish man — clearly designed after Boris Karloff's character in "The Old Dark House" — standing next to a whip-thin, vampiric woman in a slinky black dress. That same woman would later appear in additional "haunted house" strips standing next to a new husband — a squat creeper in a suit — as well her two dreadful children. Also part of the "family" were a witch-like grandmother, a bald, grinning weirdo, and a towering, Frankensteinian butler. These characters didn't have names, so readers merely referred to them as the Addams Family.

When the strips were adapted into a TV sitcom in 1964, the vampire woman was finally given a name: Morticia Addams. She and her husband Gomez were really into each other, constantly flirting...