"Girls and boys,

Come out to play,

The moon does shine

As bright as day.

Come with a hoop,

Come with a call,

Come with a good will,

Or not at all."


"Addams, master New Yorker cartoonist and black-humor prankster par excellence, has thrown tradition to the winds and taken matters into his own bedeviled hands, transforming those endearing Mother Goose characters into gleefully wicked and outrageous beings -- from the farmer's wife, seen sullenly cutting off the tails of those three blind mice with an electric knife, to Little Miss Muffet, scared half out of her mind by the size and leering grotesqueness of that big spider who sat down beside her.

"That clammy Addams touch never fails to hit its mark. In his macabre, funny way, he has given Mother Goose a dimension even she would shudder at -- but only for a moment, because the wit and candor of it all are too irresistible and insanely comic to take exception to. Addams's style and originality make his tampering with tradition completely and hilariously acceptable."

-- Chicago Tribune