Note: The Following was originally done for a class on Spies in Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University. The paper, can also be found at Sean Ahern’s Profile at Academia.edu.
The January 1961 issue of Mad Magazine would introduce a new section to the humor periodical entitled the Joke and Dagger Dept. to present the work of artist Antonio Prohias. A Cuban political cartoonist in exile after the rise of Fidel Castro, Prohias would move to New York and approach the magazine with a pair of characters that saw the world in black and white- two characters that hated the others ideas so much that they would work to kill, maim, or steal from each other at every possible chance (Evanier, 149). Spy vs. Spy would become a staple of the magazine in the coming decades with Prohias creating outlandish scenarios for the two characters to outwit and outsmart each other on a regular basis. While interactions of the black and white spy in the Spy vs. Spy comic is filled with physical humor directed at a young teen crowd, the former political newspaper cartoonist’s use of pantomime alongside a world colored in black and white helped to create a comment on the spying practices of the Cold War and parody the mysterious and often intriguing life of a spy. Using the works of Teodora Carabas and Kristin L. Matthews on the subject of Mad magazine and Spy vs. Spy, I argue the strip , while not directly political, presents a comment by Prohias and the publishers of Mad magazine during the Cold War on the black and white nature of our society in a time where shades of grey dominate. I will also the work of Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” as a basis to how to look at the spies now in a post-Cold War setting as a satire comic drawn by Peter Kuper and the changing image of spies in culture.
Castro, The Cold War, and a Cuban Cartoonist
In writing about Mad’s reading primers created during the late 1950s and early 1960s as a parody to anti-Communist readers, Kristin L. Matthews talks about the ability for the writers and artists at Mad to undermine the fears of Communism portrayed through government created propaganda magazines in the United States through the use of satire:
“Like the classical satirists, Mad used laughter as a weapon against the ‘corrupt society’ in which they lived, offering ‘a corrective of human vice and folly’ (Abrams, 1999:275-276) to all those who would read their magazine […] Although neither number crunching nor close reading cultural texts like Mad can reveal much about actual readers and their behaviors, what doing so does illustrate are the epistemological battle lines dissecting Cold War America and the various conflicts being fought over the creation, propagation, and interpretation of national narratives,” (Matthews, 248).
With the creation of The Mad Primer in 1958, the magazine looked at the effects of anti-Communist primers created to help teach children the problems of Communism and turned them on their heads, showing that the information presented by these books did more harm than good by spreading a fear of Communism that promotes “oppressive uniformity rooted in political, economic, and domestic consumption,” (Matthews, 256-257). The magazine worked to point out the inaccuracies in the world that surrounded the modern American family during the post-war Communist scare in the United States that plagued even their publisher, EC Comics. With the introduction of Fredrick Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent in 1954 alongside the Comics Code in 1955, EC Comics horror and crime books were crippled under the censorship created by the new code (Carabas, 9). Roger Sabin, author of Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art, states that while the book was academically unsound and used comic book art out of context of the original publish form, Wertham’s book created a “moral panic” in relation to comics and specifically horror and crime comics that led to copycat crimes (Sabin, 68). While the introduction of the comic code damaged a majority of the sales of EC Comics horror titles (such as Tales from the Crypt) Mad was able to work as a comedy magazine that only grew in popularity while using television, news and movies from the same time as ammo for their satire, changing from a comic to magazine format in 1954 (Sabin, 38). Mad allowed artists and writers to target the culture that built the American way of life and openly mock the Cold War rhetoric that pushed the modern family to conform out of fear of a foreign menace.
Mad #1
If Mad created a way to safely mock the Cold War fears and the culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the introduction of Antonio Prohias’ cartoon spies in the January 1961 issue of the magazine helped to again use subtlety as a weapon against the powers that be. Prohias started as a political cartoonist in Cuba, working for multiple newspapers including Zig-Zag Libre, El Diario de la Marina, El Mundo, and Bohemia throughout his career (Prohias, 7). Two decades into his career and a well established political cartoonist, Prohias began to create anti-Fidel and anti-Communist editorial cartoons in the early 1960s, leading to pressure from Fidel Castro to censure the cartoonist. When the newspaper El Mundo was seized by the new Castro-backed government, Prohias was unable to find jobs with his former connections in the newspaper world and left Cuba in May of 1960 for New York City. While working in a clothing factory in Queens, Prohias created two new characters to present to Mad (Prohias, 9). After a meeting in July of 1960, the cartoon spies first ran in the January issue of 1961 and became a mainstay of the magazine. While Prohias did little editorial cartooning after leaving Cuba in 1960, a mixture of his limited range of English and lack of firsthand knowledge of political issues of 1960’s America- as he told Jud Hurd in Cartoonist Profiles (Reprinted in Spy vs. Spy: the complete casebook) (Prohias, 11); I argue that the spies themselves are a political cartoon and are a comment on the spying practices of Cuba and the United States, or even the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies. Talking to cartoonist Bill Janocha and David Le Batard in 1994, Prohias stated that before leaving Cuba he had been playing with the idea of two spies based on his own interaction with the pro-Castro government and its supporters before leaving Cuba, where he was considered to be a dissident or spy himself. “That’s where I got the idea for ‘Spy vs. Spy,’ I thought to myself, I’m a Spy? Okay, I’m going to use this stuff; I’m going to turn into a mirror,” (Prohias, 8-9). Prohias created the two characters out of his own relationship with the power of the Castro-Controlled Cuba- having the two characters fight each other as everyone else goes on with their daily routines, unmarred by their activities. The use of pantomime to get his character’s intentions across helps to hide the social commentary of spying during a time of massive censorship of children’s comics, in hopes of presenting a western-leaning slant that is taken at face value for its physical humor.
As Carabas points out, the spies go against the norm of cartoon characters at the time, as the after effects of the Comic Code pushed characters in American comic books towards a more patriotic edge during the Cold War (Carabas, 12). The two character style of dress (trench coats, fedoras, sunglasses) combined with their use of traditional spy gadgets (poisons, knives, explosives and disguises) alongside intricate weapons that incorporate everything from chainsaws to sewer covers goes against the images of nationalism presented by other cartoons of the same era. The characters look mysterious, secretive and dangerous- going against images of nationalism apparent in other cartoon characters such as Superman or Wonder Woman who clearly wear their allegiances on their sleeves (Carabas, 12).
“Instead of a conquering hero, dressed in national colors, and always prepared to wage war against a menacing, evil “other,” the Mad world introduces two black and white characters who chase each other continuously and to no apparent effect other than their reciprocal harassment. Despite the apparent simplicity of the black-white distinction that identifies the two heroes, the Mad spies cannot be placed in a bipolar relationship. They are both good and bad, yin and yang, at the same time,” (Carabas 12-13).
The spies seemingly care for nothing more than to find new ways to annoy and hurt each other in hopes of forwarding their unnamed, uncolored, countries doctrines. Even in the first introduction of the characters- where the two spies meet for coffee (which have been poisoned by each other)- there is an (literal) unspoken animosity towards each other (Prohias, 30). Throughout the early issues, we see the two spies use clichés of the spying world to funny effect- the white spy stealing ideas for a new submarine through thought bubbles while the black spy sleeps on a park bench as the black spy steals blueprints for a tank out of the white spy’s back pocket, the white spy faking his own death only to poison the black spy as he drinks a celebratory spirit at a bar (with the white spy disguised as the bartender), and so on [Fig.1] (Prohias, 31-32). We are not given a back story or any idea of what to expect between the two spies as the characters become staples of the magazine. The characters intentionally lack a national identity during a time when national boundaries were drawn as precisely as the cartoons Prohias created himself. While Carabas is only looking specifically at the comics first few years of publication, the use of the characters by Prohias throughout the 1960s, and later the art of Bob Clarke and Dave Manak alongside writing from Duck Edwing, and in 1997 the reinvention of the spies by Peter Kuper (Prohias, 235-236); presents a hidden level of signifiers depending on the reader’s own knowledge base of world events and cultural relationships.
The characters go against the modern spy as created through Ian Fleming’s James Bond- drawn without the style of modern masculinity in mind and rather to show the seedy side of spying where neither side is completely right one hundred percent of the time. Unlike Bond, who helped to set up clear boundaries during the Cold War, showing the West as a handsome and heroic hero to the “other” of the East (and, more importantly, the Soviet Union), Prohias’ spies do not show either a good or bad side of the war between black and white—subtly commenting on the mistakes of both sides in the conflict (Carabas, 14). The characters, as Carabas points out, are “bird like” hiding behind the guise of spies who are in friendly competition with each other in every incarnation of the strip and fight for the sake of fighting (Carabas, 17). While one side might win the battle, neither are able to win the actual war; and while the captions above the cartoons even hint to the idea of a “friendly rivalry” the characters have, they are presented as enemies intent on killing each other outright- much like the “friendly rivalry” between the Soviet Union and the United States painted each other as threats to each other’s existence and way of life, as Klaus Dodds states in relation to films in the 1950s United States (Dodds, 130).
Friendly, yet deadly.
The neutrality of the spies allows for readers to not take a side in the conflict while films, like the Bond series, and comics from the time presented a skewed image of the world where the west was inevitably right and the Soviet Union was wrong. As the caption alongside the first publication of The All New MAD Secret Files on Spy vs. Spy states (reprinted in Spy vs. Spy: the complete casebook in an introduction by Grant Geissman) the spies are “the MAD-est spies in the whole world,” and, “Their antics are almost as funny as the CIA’s. These two spies taught James Bond everything he knows- about what not to do,” (Prohias, 9). While Prohias himself never editorialized in the comic itself, and the comic shows the pitfalls of a world of absolutes, the introductions of the comics repeatedly mention how he fled from the oppressive dictatorship of Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba for a better life in the United States- commenting on his work as a political cartoonist and his accolades in a pre-Castro Cuba. In the first introduction of the strip, the writer mentions that he (Prohias) was “stone broke,” after fleeing for New York, playing up the artists own struggles after leaving his home country (Prohias, 30). While Prohias might have seen his cartoon characters as neutral on the playing field or even a lighthearted departure from editorial cartooning days, the Mad’s “Usual Gang of Idiots,” I argue, used the two spies not only as a jab at other fictional spies of the day but also as a commentary on the futility of spying between the United States and The Soviet Union . That the spying between the two nations and its allies were done just for the sake of spying and out of the fear of what the other might know- that the positive that is created out of spy characters in itself is a futile struggle that only does further damage to those on both sides of the conflict.
Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy
In a world of black and white characters, Prohias’ introduction of a female gray spy only adds to the political undertone of Spy vs. Spy. The grey spy, introduced in Issue #73 in September of 1962, balances out the edges of the spectrum created by the black and white spies and remains “cool and in control of the situation” whenever she appears (Carabas, 19). Unlike the two greedy, mysterious and comically drawn spies, the female grey spy is able to play both sides- she not only is able to use the hatred of the two spies towards each other to her advantage, but also use her sexuality to lure the spies into traps that leave her on top, be it selling the two spies guns with the wrong size ammo or luring them into an alligator’s mouth (Prohias, 51, 81). As Carabas points out, the character not only creates a shade of gray that wins out in a black and white world, but as a strong female spy she humiliates and removes the power from the male characters around her.
“The gray spy is the only character in the strip who always has it her way, and her victories over the black and white spies maker the latter even more inadequate to either save the world or win the girl. Her presence emasculates and delegitimates the male spies around her, thus rendering them completely inapt to advance the traditional action-hero narrative or romantically emplot the Cold War conflict,” (Carabas, 19).
The introduction and battles with the gray spy only further the idea that in world of bumbling absolutes, the additions of shades of gray still dominate the narrative. While the black and white spies are unable to think outside the box to outwit each other, they are constantly beaten by a smarter enemy who neutralizes both of them in the simplest ways possible. The characters are again both a parody of fictionalized tales of spies in popular culture and also that of the two dominant ideals of the time period, with Prohias showing that both sides yearn for an ideal mixture of both ways of life (through the gray spy) but unable to come to terms with that ideal, often to disastrous results. The two spies are caught up in their own struggle to outwit each other, they forget about any chance for a compromise.
Based on a reader’s own knowledge base, depending on the age and geographical region of the reader, the characters of Spy vs. Spy take on new life and present a new idea in relation to looking at the world around them. The characters own colored boundaries represent two sides of the same coin- both ideas create a “friendly” rivalry that snowballs to dangerous levels, as the characters kill and main each other time and time again. While the characters work effectively inside the parameters of the Cold War as a humorous take on spies, they can also be read as a political comment on the separate factions of the Cold War and the risk they are willing to take to reach an end goal. While the original creations by Prohias presented a lighthearted (if not physical-comedy laden) outlook on the world, the work of later artists on the comic, in particular the works of Peter Kuper, show how the spies can be re-imagined for a new audience in a Post-Cold War setting.
A Re-imagining of Black and White in a Post-Cold War World
In 1996, artist Peter Kuper was picked by Mad to become the full time Spy vs. Spy artist, taking over where Prohias left off. “From the moment I put pen to paper, I felt like the Spies had been encoded into my DNA. I was flooded with pleasurable memories of following their escapades as a teenager and I rediscovered the impact Antonio Prohias’s wordless storytelling had had on my own work,” (Prohias, 281). Following in the footsteps of Prohias, Kuper would leave his own mark on the long running spy strip by adding his own flair to the characters- creating images that resembled street art rather than the straight and distinct drawings established by Prohias. The characters, while still the recognizable spies created by Prohias, now lived in a stencil and painted world that re-introduced the characters to a new generation of readers in the mid- 1990s. With the death of Prohias in February of 1998 at the age of 77 and the reintroduction of the spies to a new audience with a new style from Kuper, Spy vs. Spy was created in a post-Cold War setting for a new audience where the gag relied less on the secret agent qualities of the characters and more on the physical humor. Even though the characters are out of the distinct boundaries of the Cold War, I argue that Spy vs. Spy, like James Bond, is able to still have an effect on the readership of Mad and help to create a better understanding of a worldview through the satire of the two characters as popular culture images that not only found in the comic panels of Mad, but also as an image for deceitful spying practices at home and abroad.
In relation to Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding,” since the introduction of the black and white spies into our culture by Prohias, the characters have become synonymous with the seedier side of spying and the repercussions of spying in a post-Cold War, post- 9/11 world. The characters, originally encoded as a play upon spying and espionage have been decoded nearly five decades later as an image of what is wrong with modern spying practices (Hall, 125). While Prohias originally presented the characters as two sides of the same coin, in endless battle with one and other, the characters have become a part of popular culture outside the framing of Mad. In a July 7 editorial cartoon for The Ottawa Citizen by Cam Cardow, the black and white spy are seen facing each other. The black spy, labeled Russia, carries a round cartoon bomb behind his back while the white spy, labeled U.S. holds a stick of dynamite behind his back as he sheepishly asks “You mean you’ve been (gasp) spying on me?!!” as the black (Russian) spy leers menacingly at the white (U.S.) spy (Cardow).
Cartoon by Cardow, July 2010 (Source: Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoons)
The character’s transformation into the not-so-veiled political realm creates a new layer to the image of the two characters- now labeled distinctly as Russia and the United States- and their animosity towards each other. Dodds, in “Screening Geopolitics: James Bond and the Early Cold War films (1962-1967),” writes about how film helps to make “everyday connections” between popular culture and political ideals (Dodds, 267). Where the Bond movies help to connect real world post-colonial politics of England to the national hero in James Bond through his global travels, Dodds writes:
“Over the last ten years, disciplines such as International Relations (IR) have embraced the so-called ‘return of culture’ in a variety of ways. It has been raised not only as an issue of forthcoming insecurity in the form of civilisations and corresponding clashes but also the context of how popular culture might influence/shape/reproduce the foreign security policies of governments. Moreover, Cynthia Weber has recently noted, ‘accessing visual culture through popular films allows us to consider connections between IR theory and our everyday lives,’” (Dodds, 267).
I argue in relation to the ideas that Dodds presents that popular culture shapes how we see foreign policy, and in particular, how popular characters can be used as a way to bridge the gap between how we see the world and how the world sees us. Spy vs. Spy today is still as important as it was as a part of Mad’s lineup in the 1960s during the Cold War and has new meaning as the significance of the characters has grown in the forty-plus years as a part of the magazine.
Kuper’s version of the spies mixes the characters original style of Prohias alongside a style influence heavily by graffiti art that incorporates stenciling techniques alongside the traditional artist techniques. Kuper said that he did not want to imitate Prohias or go too far outside the original idea of the characters. “I didn’t think of trying to imitate Prohias. First of all, who could? Second of all, I figured if I go wild and they don’t like it, that’s the end. But if they do, then I’ve got a shot at creating something that is at least partly my own and that I could feel was a creation instead of an imitation,” (Evanier, 253). Kuper’s style delineates from the intricate but simple lines created by Prohias and builds upon the character’s designs by first penciling the page, making a photocopy of his penciled drawing and then uses an X-Acto knife to cut out sections, finally using watercolor paper and Krylon spray pain, colored pencils and watercolors to finish his design (Evanier, 254). The style adds to the design of the characters and creates a new layer to the characters overall appearance in recent years [Fig 4]. Before Mad changed to a color version of the magazine in recent years, Kuper states that he was not completely satisfied with the overall production of the black and white comic, because the process of publication picked up gray markings within the images that he created (Evanier, 254).
Kuper’s art also was gorier than the images depicted by Prohias, as the characters (when maimed) eject pieces of body parts, intestines and various organs depending on the severity of the contraption used against them. The evolution of death scenes for the characters builds upon the comical and goes towards the extreme as characters are killed off in each version of the comic. The characters show pain in a violent way rather than a comedic way (even though the violence is also over the top in many situations) that I believe is a reflection of the sinister deeds done in spying by both characters. While Kuper is updating the character’s look and physical comedy, the characters are still black and white in a world where shades of grey still dominate the landscape, almost literally as Kuper points out in his earlier strips before the cartoon was published in color. While those boundaries may no longer relate to the Cold War tensions of the United States, Cuba and its ally in the Soviet Union; they still present a world where your enemy is unnamed and constantly changing. While the fear may no longer be Communism, the threat of terrorism allows the spies to be effective as unknown enemies in unmarked, fictional, countries that fight for the sake of fighting, or, spy for the sake of spying. This new idea of spying is further developed as the threat of terrorism moves away from a specific region of the world to smaller splinter groups that are not only global, but come from a wide range economic and educational backgrounds (Bergen,77). The characters, while still painted in black or white, now more than ever satirize a world where spying and intelligence work is mixed inside multiple shades of gray. While their original purpose has been lost in the Cold War, the boundaries created by the two characters still present a world of absolutes, a simpler world where black and white are able to fight on nonsensical terms, between themselves, as the world moves around them. The spy characters are as relevant under the guidance of Kuper as they were under Prohias and, I argue, help to forward a satirical look at the world and the fear of spying from both government agencies and individuals. The portrayal of these spies as bumbling, creepy characters helps to undermine these fears and reinforce cultural beliefs of the spies place as a dangerous character being controlled by the will of their own nation.
Conclusion
In “’What Me Worry?’ Teaching Media Literacy through Satire and Mad Magazine,” Craig Stark states that the use of Mad helps to bring to light student awareness of media-centered issues ranging from the political and social issues to the economic (Stark, 306). “Satire can be thought of as a cognitive ‘bucket of water in the face’ for students, helping to startle them into a new awareness of media messages and a new understanding of themselves. Such awareness is a perquisite to media literacy, and satire can be an effective trigger,” (Stark, 306). The use of satire to inform and create a new outlook for students, Stark argues, includes the use of fake advertisements in the magazine to help control their ability to consume texts critically. This idea works well alongside Marshall McLuhan’s interpretation of the magazine- where he explains the power of Mad and its effect on presenting the “iconic age,” where the “primal innocence” of earlier cartoons has been left behind (McLuhan, 109). The images portrayed in the magazine satirize the world around us on a daily basis and I would forward Stark’s argument by going as far to say that the cartoons inside the magazine, including Spy vs. Spy, critically look at the world through a lens that is accessible to large audience, even if that original intent is a departure from traditional editorial cartoons. With the creation of Spy vs. Spy we are able to see how Prohias is able to satirize the Cold War fascination of spies through blundering mirror images that neither win nor lose every single time. The characters evolution though different writers and artists while sticking to a specific formula, allows for the characters to change while staying close enough to the original to still be effective in looking at the world through a specific lens that both brings awareness to the world of intelligence gathering and the issues of living at the edges of ideologies. With the introduction of Kuper as the new Spy vs. Spy artist in the 1990s we are given a new perspective on an old idea, as a fan of the series, he re-contextualizes the two spies outside their original context and into a violent new world, where spying is not coded as a necessary evil, but as an evil that leads to morbid consequences. The two spying characters, with their cartoon bomb and outlandish disguises continue to trick each other to anger at every possible turn- showing that constant fighting never ceases until a compromise can be made somewhere in the middle.
Works Cited
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Cardow, Cameron “Cam.” “Spy VS Spy”. The Ottawa Citizen. July 7, 2010. Daryl
Cagle’s PoliticalCartoons.com. JPEG. Retrieved on April 26, 2011.
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Evanier, Mark. Mad Art. 1st. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2002. 149-154;253-256. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. Ed.
Harrington, C. Lee; Denise D. Bielby. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Print.
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McLuhan, Marshall. “Comics: Mad Vestibule to TV.” Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium. Ed. Heer, Jeet and Kent Worchester. Jackson: Unviersity Press of Mississippi, 2004.
Prohias, Antonio. Spy vs. Spy: the complete casebook. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2001. 7-10; 30-31; 51; 81; 235-236; 280-281. Print.
Sabin, Roger. Comics, comix & graphic novels. London: Phaidon, 1996. 38-42; 68. Print.
“Spy Palm Tree.” Spy vs. Spy Gallery. Web. 27 Apr 2011. <http://www.peterkuper.com/artforsale/salehtml/spyvsspys.html>.
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