Spy vs. Spy

Spy vs. Spy is a wordless comic strip that began in Mad magazine in January 1961, created by the Cuban expatriate cartoonist Antonio Prohias, who drew it until 1987. Other artists and writers then took it over, and Peter Kuper has written and illustrated it since 1997. The strip is a parody of the political ideologies of the Cold War. It follows two nearly identical agents, one dressed in white and one in black, each with a long beak-like head, white pupils and black sclera. They are forever at war, setting booby traps meant to injure each other, and the strip usually alternates between victory and defeat for each spy, sometimes with both winning or both losing in the same installment. The characters have spread beyond the page into video games, an animated television series, action figures and trading cards, which is why the strip is treated here as a franchise and not only as a single comic feature.