A Romp Through Rea Irvin’s Forgotten Sunday Funnies

Rea Irvin, the magazine’s first art editor, is best known for creating Eustace Tilley, the monocled dandy whose upturned nose has graced our pages for a hundred years. Irvin established the stylish and refined look of The New Yorker, brought in countless new artists, and also penned many early covers that display his graphic mastery.

Next month, a new book edited by the New Yorker artist R. Kikuo Johnson and the cartoonist Dash Shaw reintroduces one of Irvin’s lesser-known pursuits: “The Smythes,” a Sunday comic page that ran in the New York Herald Tribune and a few other newspapers beginning in 1930. Irvin’s characters followed the form of “Bringing Up Father,” an immensely popular series about an overbearing wife and a put-upon husband written by the master cartoonist George McManus, whose style was itself a tour de force of elegant and well-designed storytelling. In McManus’s strip, much of the humor derives from the juxtaposition between the wife’s class striving and her husband’s contentment with corned beef and cabbage. In Irvin’s world, John and Margie Smythe are both driven by their aspirations to appear sophisticated (perhaps not unlike Eustace Tilley).

The strips, gorgeously composed, with characters dancing elegantly on the page, chronicle Margie’s misguided but ardent worship of her husband. They often deliver gentle punch lines displaying the cartoonist’s affection for the couple’s follies and foibles. Somewhat unsurprisingly, mocking the hapless rich during the Great Depression did not draw a large audience. After five years, Irvin redirected his attention to characters lower on the social ladder—but to no avail. Eventually, in 1936, he retired the strip. It has remained in obscurity until now. In the excerpt below, selected pages offer a playfully wry and tender portrait of married life among the social set.