January 17th - Spy vs. Spy

A Year In Comics - January 17th

Day 17: Spy vs. Spy

Antonio Prohias was born on January 17th 1921 in Cienfuegos, Cuba.  By the age of 25, in 1946, he was given the Juan Gualberto Gómez Award, in recognition of him being the greatest cartoonist in Cuba.  Working for the El Mundo newspaper from the late 1940s, Prohias went on to become the president of the Cuban Cartoonists' Association.  During 1956, he created the first of his famous characters, El Hombre Siniestro, who encapsulated the mood of Cuba at that particular time, when the Batista dictatorship was being beleagered by Fidel Castro's rebels.

When the Batista government fell on January 1st 1959, Prohias was first honoured by Fidel Castro for his anti-Batista cartoons - but soon Castro led a crackdown against the Cuban press, and when Prohias spoke out against this, he found himself accused of being a CIA spy.  As a result of this, he resigned his position at El Mundo in February of 1959, and subsequently fled to the United States with his family, leaving Cuba for New York on May 1st 1960.

Ten weeks after his arrival in New York, Prohias walked into the offices of Mad, unannounced and with his daughter by his side to act as an interpreter.  By the time he left, he had managed to sell his idea to the magazine: Spy vs. Spy was first published in the January 1961 issue of Mad magazine.

Spy vs. Spy was a wordless comic, which originally started as an anti-Castro strip but soon became an outright parody of the Cold War itself, with the Black and White Spies constantly vying to get the better of one another - if they weren't being outwitted themselves by the female Grey Spy (first introduced in 1962, and featuring in occasional Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy strips between September 1962 and December 1965).  In all, Prohias drew 270 cartoons for Mad Magazine between 1961 and 1987, of which 241 were Spy vs. Spy installments.  His last cartoon was published in the March 1987 issue, when he gave up drawing the comic due to health issues.

Prohias most enjoyed that he made his fame and fortune from that of which he had been accused by Fidel Castro.  On February 24th 1998, Antonio Prohias died of lung cancer at the age of 77; however, his creations continue to live on (and die) in the pages of Mad Magazine.

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