Classic Comics – The Smythes
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Rea Irvin, the [New Yorker]’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.
Françoise Mouly, current art editor of The New Yorker, reads a new book and passes on her thoughts:
…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 … In Irvin’s world, John and Margie Smythe are both driven by their aspirations to appear sophisticated (perhaps not unlike Eustace Tilley).
Mouly’s review contains a gallery of large full color reproductions of the the comic strip.
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…
The Smythes by Rea Irvin is from New York Review Books and is available December 9, 2025.
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