Rea Irvin (1881–1972) is barely remembered for his trove of comic acuity. He was art editor, illustrator and cartoonist for Life in its original incarnation as a humor magazine. More importantly, Irvin was The New Yorker’s first art editor and creator of the magazine’s distinctive typeface called Irvin (still in use today), as well as its mascot, the butterfly enthusiast and dandy Eustace Tilly. In 1930, he turned his pen to newspaper comics with The Smythes.
John, Margie, and their two middling children, Willie and Maudie, are the essential wannabe status-seeking suburban family eager to climb the social ladder to a higher level of the American dream—despite the real-time economic disaster of the Great Depression. The Smythe’s “fancy themselves fancy while fumbling through the world that doesn’t quite align with their posturing,” writes Caitlin McGurk in the afterword to Rea Irvin’s The Smythes (NYRC), an entertaining anthology of rare strips. Irvin’s masterful line renders the hilariously snobby Smythes 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.
The Smythes is akin to a period screwball movie or stageplay as it captures through deadpan wit and nuanced satire the various humiliations of being in a pretentious vortex of skin-deep American family. Handpicked by cartoonists R. Kikuo Johnson and Dash Shaw—who wrote the introduction together—this curation of Smythes strips highlights the first five years of an eight-year run (in which the elder Smythes are the main characters). “An unsung masterpiece of cartooning,” McGurk writes, The Smythes introduces the contemporary graphic novel generation to a treasure of situational comics—of its time, to be sure, but true to the absurdity of the Trump epoch and status (and wealth) as a measure of worth.
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