Spy vs. Spy

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"The Cold War may be over, but the Lukewarm War rages on!"

A recurring cartoon feature in Mad magazine, originally created by the Cuban exile Antonio Prohías. As the title implies, it is about two spies, Black and White, who constantly try to outdo (usually read as: "kill") each other with varying levels of success. Sometimes a plan goes off without a hitch, sometimes the other Spy has a hidden countermeasure that makes everything blow up in their faces (literally, whenever possible). Occasionally, a female Grey Spy would show up to do them both in.

After Prohías retired, he passed the strip on to others. Artistic duties later went to George Woodbridge (for one issue), Bob Clarke and then Dave Manak, all with Don "Duck" Edwing as the main writer (although other writers sometimes contributed, most often Andrew J. Schwartzberg). In 1997, coinciding with a Retool of the magazine, artistic and writing duties went to Peter Kuper, who still does it to this day.

There are a small set of different games based on the series, the first being the most ported of all of them.

Tropes used in Spy vs. Spy include:

• Acme Products: These often pop up in Kuper's strips.
• Animated Adaptation: For MAD TV sketches. They follow the scripts of various strips to the letter most of the time.
  • Now an element of the new MAD cartoon.
• Anyone Can Die: Over, and over, and over again. Except Grey Spy.
• Art Evolution: The spies went from looking like this to this. (Note especially that their inverted black eyes with white pupils started out as black sunglasses with white reflections)
• Backwards-Firing Gun: Occurs in one strip drawn for a series of paperbacks.
• Badass Longcoat: Both worn by both spies.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Ever since Peter Kuper took over, many of the gags have become a lot more visceral.
• Cartoon Bomb: Regularly deployed by both spies.
• Characterization Marches On: The first gag had both spies trying to poison each other. Neither one died!
• Cheated Angle: The Spies' heads are almost never shown from the front, but it does happen from time to time. (See the page image for This Is Going to Suck for an example.)
• Continuity Nod: Occasionally the spies will reuse previous plans with new twists.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The strip's been running in color since 2001, but many depictions and animations of the Spies still portray them in a monochrome world.
• Disney Death: The spies always come back alive. Possibly because they're part of a larger spy organization and therefore are replaced (one comic had White Spy strafing a funeral held by Black Spies for one of their own. Turns out they were hiding a surface-to-air missile in the casket).
  • Or it could always be the They Killed Kenny case.
• Disney Villain Death: Sometimes the losing spy dies from falling.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Whenever the Grey Spy is around.
• Evil Versus Evil: Of course, neither spy is portrayed as good OR evil, since both of them are equally ruthless towards each other. Whether they're evil or not is a matter of fan interpretation.
• Femme Fatale: the Grey spy.
• Friendly Enemy: The spies would often hang out together, even though they are setting traps for each other.
• Gambit Pileup
• Gambit Roulette: A particularly notable example is the black spy staging his own decommissioning from his embassy in an elaborate scheme to kill the white spy.
• Her Child, but Not His: In one of the little mini-comics you'll find permeating the margins of Mad Magazine, White Spy arrives home to find his obviously pregnant wife Grey Spy knitting a little black spy suit.
  • Of course in the first place both Spies' skin are the same color. You never hear about the Red and Blue spies being "Racist".
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Happens often, usually thanks to one of the spies tinkering with the other's trap.
• I Know You Know I Know: Too many times to count.
• Instrument of Murder: Weapons disguised as musical instruments occur a few times.
• Live Action Adaptation: In a series of Mountain Dew commercials starting in 2004.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Prohias wasn't shy about drawing shoes, hats, and dentures flying all over the place after an explosion. Later comics began to graphically illustrate heavy wounds, once Peter Kuper took over.
• Maximum Capacity Overload: Deliberately done in one comic, with White tricking Black into carrying several 1000-pound weights on an elevator (he thinks they are White's secret plans).
• Minimalist Cast: With a few exceptions (the spies' leaders and the Gray Spy for example) the spies are practically the only people in their universe.
• Murder by Cremation: In the last strip in the short-lived Sunday strip, Black Spy becomes a victim to this.
• Nice Hat: All three spies wear them.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Mild example. In one particular strip, Black sees a girl trapped in a cage on top of a wooden pole. He climbs up, intending to help her only for the cage to fall down and trap him at the bottom of the pole. It was a trap from White and he's seen taking his disguise off and laughing at a shocked Black.
• Oh Crap: The losing spy sometimes realizes too late that he's been had, resulting in either this trope or This Is Gonna Suck.
• Out-Gambitted: Provides the page image.
• Palette Swap: The two spies, other than the colors of their clothing, look identical. And the 2005 Xbox game featured a Red spy and a Blue spy.
• Pie in the Face: Every Episode Ending in the much Lighter and Softer Spy vs Spy Jr., which ran for a short time in Mad Kids.
• Shoe Phone: There are several examples of this, as the two spies use these to kill each other. Examples include special shells that disguise their firearms as certain props like hairdryers and cameras. They disguise bombs as harmless items from time to time as well, like books, teeth, and credit cards.
• Silence Is Golden: No one in the entire comic's run has spoken an understandable word (although a Spy uses a recording of himself saying "Stick 'em Up" in one strip); Prohías spoke almost no English when he began drawing the strip, but his earlier Spanish-language comics like El Hombre Siniestro contained precious little Spanish. It was simply his style.
• Spy-Versus-Spy: Why else would we call it that?
• Stuff Blowing Up
• Straw Loser: Both spies, to the Lady in Gray.
• Sunday Strip: A very short-lived version in 2002, drawn by Manak and written by Edwing.
• The Television Talks Back: In one strip, White Spy climbs into Black Spy's television to shoot him through it. Turns out Black Spy's remote holds a machine gun.
  • In an earlier strip, the White Spy set up a camera to see if the Black Spy would show up. He appeared to be there, but he was actually inside the TV.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Provides the page image. Generally, if a Spy finds out too late he's been had, it'll be either this trope or Oh Crap.
• Too Dumb to Live: The losing spy, on certain occasions. Also, when the Grey Spy shows up, if the two spies wouldn't drool over her and try to win her, they wouldn't end up in her traps.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Meta-example - Prohías couldn't bring himself to let the Grey Spy lose because he didn't want to draw a woman suffering the usual fates of the loser in the comic. Eventually he phased her out because her inability to lose was boring.
  • Peter Kuper brought her back.
  • Prohías may have had qualms with it, but some fans show no mercy.
• Xanatos Gambit: Related to the above. While the Grey Spy always won she was eventually phased out of the comic entirely. Considering how the Black and White spies can't prema-kill each other maybe they lost on purpose.
• Xylophone Gag: In a rare example of the trope working, White Spy rigs a piano to squirt nitro glycerin into Black Spy's mouth when he pushes certain keys. Boom.

The games have examples of the following tropes

• Artificial Stupidity: It is exceptionally easy to bait the AI into your traps. Even on hard and/or the last level(s) of the game.
  • Most notably, the time bomb trap placed in a room with a pickup will almost always get them in any port of the first game. They never learn that going out and back in would save them the trouble of having to try and stop you from running straight for the exit.
  • AI Breaker: Operation: Booby Trap has numerous field hazards, which the AI knows not to stand in. The AI also knows it can jump through most (but not all) of these. However, the AI has the following quirk: When the AI retreats from you without moving up or down, it will stay just off the edge of the screen and wait a second to recover some health. HOWEVER, if you so much as inch towards the computer, he will approach you regardless of health and attempt (briefly) to stand next to you so that he can punch you. You should see where this is going: stand at the edge of a damage hazard, repeatedly bait the computer into said hazard fast enough to where he doesn't recover health, and let the computer DIE FROM THE HAZARD.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The computer will never lose the knife (first game and all ports except the Game Boy Color) and knows EXACTLY where each item is (Extremely apparent on Operation: Booby Trap, where the first two items the computer picks up will invariably end up being Attache Case and Key Item in that order)
• Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: The key items you lose in the first game get hidden in the room you died in, and you just lose 30 seconds on your clock (and have to wait 5 seconds to respawn). Operation: Booby Trap dumps your items into a random chest (even booby trapped ones) without decreasing your timer, but the respawn time is 10 seconds.
  • However, the respawn timer is MORE than enough for most competent players - and the AI - to bolt for the exit if they have everything, and on Operation: Booby Trap, dying when your opponent has all the items is almost a guaranteed loss.
• Fan Remake: SPYvsSPYvsSPYvsSPY. Thinking of two spies can't satisfy you? We have FOUR!
• Life Meter: Operation: Booby Trap actually has a visible one, and traps in that game do not instant-kill. It does, however, slow you down after taking so much damage.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Traps effectively turn the victim into this on everything except Operation: Booby Trap.
• Timed Mission
• Too Dumb to Live: You shouldn't get killed by the same trap you set 5 seconds ago. Especially if you've got EVERY key item on you.
• X-Ray Sparks