Description: "Rea Irvin was The New Yorker's first art editor and creator of the magazine's iconic mascot, the butterfly enthusiast Eustace Tilly. In 1930, he ventured into new territory with the comic strip The Smythes. The Smythes--comprised of John, Margie, and their two forgettable children, Willie and Maudie--are a niceish suburban family, restless in their social stature, and eager to climb a sometimes wobbly social ladder (a ladder made even wobblier by the Great Depression). Irvin's distinct, graceful line renders the Smythes in all their glory and hilarity as they navigate ill-fated dinner parties with pompous socialites, fend off robbers dressed as Santa, and get chased out of restaurants by cleaver-wielding chefs. With flavors of the upper-crust humor of Wodehouse and the suburban surrealism of Cheever, The Smythes drolly captures the joys, heartbreaks, and humiliations of being in a family"--
Review Quotes: "The strips [are] gorgeously composed, with characters dancing elegantly on the page.... [A] playfully wry and tender portrait of married life among the social set." --Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker
"The invaluable Irvin, artist, ex-actor, wit, and sophisticate about town and country, did more to develop the style and excellence of New Yorker drawings and covers than anyone else." --James Thurber "The strip was a domestic comedy; a husband and wife navigating the brittle charms and absurdities of upper-middle-class life. But under Irvin's pen, the couple became something more than a gag. They were a mirror, lightly fogged with irony, reflecting the anxieties and aspirations of postwar America . . .To read Rea Irvin's The Smythes now is to rediscover not only his forgotten brilliance but a quieter kind of humor, one that trusts its reader to see the joke without being told when to laugh. It's a reminder that irony and tenderness, in the right hands, are not opposites at all." --Tammi Morton-Kelly, The Comics Journal