Disposable Lit Reviews

Watson Guptill, 2001
304 pp.
ISBN 0-8230-5021-1

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I miss the Usual Gang of Idiots.

Mort Drucker. Jack Davis. Don Berg. These were some of the iconic names associated with MAD Magazine while I was growing up, filling their black-and-white pages with parodies of movies I’d never seen and sexual innuendoes I never got. Who’s left of the “classic” bunch? Sergio Aragones, I guess, but that’s not enough to carry the whole magazine.

The most iconic of them all was Antonio Prohias, because aside from about a dozen other features he did for them in over twenty years, Prohias did exactly one thing: Spy vs. Spy. Combining a wordless pantomime with explosions, brutal injury, and devious cruelty… what’s not for a pre-adolescent to like?

Prohias was originally a political cartoonist in his native Cuba, but when Papa Castro made public statements identifying him by name as an enemy of the state, Prohias fled with his family to New York. Casting about for some way to make money with his cartooning skills despite absolutely no knowledge of English (a skill he never really picked up), he turned to one of his earlier, political-but-not-overtly-so features: El Hombre Siniestro, which featured a sinister-looking fellow who went around pulling cruel pranks for a laugh. He even had a wide-brimmed hat and a long, pointy nose. So the new idea which he came up with simply involved two such masters of subterfuge in an endless cycle of violence and betrayal. He did up a few strips, wandered into the offices of MAD Magazine, and the rest is history.

Thanks to his background, Prohias couldn’t avoid making a political feature out of it, but instead of applying to any particular political situation, it became instead a statement on some eternal verities of politics: There is a White Spy. There is a Black Spy. They are always trying to get the upper hand on one another, as much through each knowing how his counterpart will react as through force of arms. And here’s the kicker: Despite the baggage of black and white, there ain’t no good guy. There ain’t no bad guy. (There’s only you and me, and we just disagree… Sorry. Got carried away.) Or if there is any moral superiority, it would have to be confined to the undefined countries backing these two spies, because taken as individuals, each is as dedicated to mayhem and dismemberment as the other. White and black, both are simply dedicated to the continual defeat of the enemy, using the same tools and methods. For an eight-year-old, that’s like, whoa, deep, man!

This collection contains every Spy vs. Spy strip Prohias did. Every one. Just think; with at least one per month for over twenty-five years, that’s an awful lot of strips. It’s nifty to breeze through the whole collection and note, for example, that those spy eyes were originally dark glasses; it was only later that they stylized into the eyes themselves. And it’s surreal to read through and say, “Hey, I’ve seen this one before — in about 1976!”

Not only is every Spy vs. Spy cartoon in here, but there’s also a representative sample of the El Hombre Siniestro and La Mujer Siniestro that he did both in Cuba and later for a Cuban-American newspaper in Florida. Also represented are the political cartoons which caused such a drastic change of address. And there are essays and tributes from those who knew him and worked with him, including editors, his daughter, and his fellow “permanent latino” at MAD, Sergio Aragones.

They even include some pages showing Prohias’ transition out in 1986, when failing health curtailed even his cartooning activities. (He died in 1999.) Examining some of his shakier linework in the months directly before his retirement, one finally realizes that the graceful thick-and-thin lines he used so expertly weren’t actually brushwork; they were meticulously filled in with a technical pen. Other artists ghosted from his unfinished sketches for a while, before other creative teams moved in and continued the feature. Enough of those post-Prohias strips are included here to show that, while they’re good and all, they’re certainly not up to the level of Prohias’ own work.

If I have one complaint about this book, it’s that in the interests of space, too many of the cartoons (designed for a full page) have been shrunk down to four-to-a-page. It takes some squinting to make out the goings-on, and far too much of Prohias’ exquisite detail is lost. But given that the softcover book is already an inch thick, I’d much rather than option than an abridged “best of” volume. How would you choose the best? Even lesser Prohias is still damned good.

Nathan Shumate