History ComicStrip / SpyVsSpy

After Prohías retired, he passed the strip on to others. Bob Clarke illustrated from 1987 to 1993, then George Woodbridge for two issues, followed by Dave Manak from 1993 to 1997. Clarke's first four installments were still written by Prohías, but Duck Edwing did most of the gag writing under the other artists' tenures and other writers pitched in on occasion (including Michael Gallagher, with whom Manak previously worked on ''ComicBook/SonicTheHedgehogArchieComics''). From 1997 to the present day, the strip is drawn and almost always written by Peter Kuper.

* FootsieUnderTheTable: In one of the few strips not to feature the losing spy's grisly demise, the Black and White Spies are both invited to tea with a GrandeDame, and shortly after they take their seats, the Black Spy is amazed to see their hostess kick off a shoe and rub her foot amorously up his leg. So he kicks off his shoe and returns the gesture... only for the enraged hostess to give him an ArmorPiercingSlap before literally kicking him out of the front door. Meanwhile, the grinning White Spy produces the fake leg he used to set the trap.

* ChocolateBaby: Parodied in one of the little Creator/SergioAragones mini-comics you'll find permeating the margins of Mad Magazine, where the White Spy arrives home to find his obviously pregnant wife Grey Spy knitting a little black spy suit for the baby.

* NiceHat: All three spies wear them.

* AllPsychologyIsFreudian: In one strip, White has recurring nightmares involving him being killed by Black throwing a knife in front of a building's door. He goes to see a therapist (who looks like Freud himself with beard and a cigar) who explains that many of the objects dreamed about are due to psychological issues: a dysfunctional family (Knife), an inner child alter ego (Black), repressed sexuality (Door), and Social/Religious/Economic stress (Background). White then happily walks out without his weapons and thanks the therapist... who turns out to be a disguised-Black, who then kills white by throwing a knife at him exactly like his dreams entailed.

** In one strip, later turned into an AnimatedAdaptation, White takes pictures of a hot beach babe, glues them to the inside of Black's glasses while he's tanning, sets up a wooden pole and cat calls Black to wake him up, who's so struck with lust that he sprints right into the wooden pole and dies while White sits back and laughs.

* {{Bizarrchitecture}}: Justified by artistic necessity in most cases, but it's still jarring to see houses that seem to exist without an entire wall or are comprised of just one bathroom.

** In the ending of Danger! Intrigue! Stupidty!, Black bumps into a tombstone made for White that lists all the time Black killed him in earlier pages. He gets so amused and distracted by reading all the times he won that he doesn't noticed he's walking down a ladder into a hole so White can bury him alive.
** In a strip by Kuper, Black has his revenge by tricking White into thinking he died and was buried in a cemetery, who read the newspaper and [[LastDisrespects ran to his grave to dance over it]], only for it to be a hollowed out hole and for Black to be the guy tending the graves, who promptly shovels dirt into White's new grave while he's still in there so he can dance over it instead.

** One strip had both Spies run into each on the street with [[SenselessViolins violin cases]], and both hurrying to open theirs. White Spy pulled a gun out of his case - Black Spy pulled a regular violin out of his and began chasing White while playing it very poorly.

* EstablishingCharacterMoment: The above-mentioned first gag, in which the spies have a friendly drink of tea - feeding their cups to nearby cats, who both die from the poison as the spies walk away. Unusually for an Establishing Character Moment, as mentioned above, something happened that has almost never happened since: a ''tie.''

* ImprovisedWeapon: One story that was animated for ''WesternAnimation/{{MAD}}'' has Black ambushed by White with a machine gun while skiing; he turns one of his skis and his belt into an impromptu bow and arrow, and shoots a ski pole into White's chest.

* OutGambitted: Many strips feature one of the Spies trying to spring a trap, only for the other Spy to have a countertrap ready to return fire. Just to give one example for each spy:

** In one strip, the White Spy sees the Black Spy standing on the pavement next to a MacGuffin briefcase. He puts a bomb in an identical briefcase, puts it down next to the Black Spy, and picks up the other briefcase... only to discover that the Black Spy bolted it to the paving slab, so that the White Spy picks up ''both'' briefcases and gets blown up by his own bomb.

** In one strip, later turned into an AnimatedAdaptation, White glues a hot beach babe to Black's glasses while he's tanning, sets up a wooden pole and cat calls Black to wake him up, who's so struck with lust that he sprints right into the wooden pole and dies while White sits back and laughs.

** As an actual comic gag, one early strip had the Black Spy eavesdropping on White who is apparently tapping out morse code messages over the radio. Black gets some paper and pencil and starts copying everything down, only for the message to become so long and fast that he's buried in papers while still writing. White opens the door to check on him, revealing he had a woodpecker tapping a tree log to screw with Black.

* OutGambitted: Provides the page image.

* BlondesAreEvil: As shown in colorized prints of the comics, the Grey Spy is blond and so are Black and White when they style their hair sometimes. The Xbox title also gives Black and White balding blond hair under their hats.

* ArtEvolution: The spies went from looking like [[https://i.imgur.com/UGcls7H.jpg this]] to [[http://www.spyvsspyhq.com/spy130.jpg this.]] (Note especially that their inverted black eyes with white pupils started out as black sunglasses with white reflections). They also had buck teeth, smaller hats and shorter 'beaks' compared to later versions as the strip went on.

* BuriedAlive: One of their most infamous gags. While White is looking at a plan in the middle of the desert sun, Black sneaks behind to clobber him but falls in White's shadow, which turns out to be a Spy-shaped hole right before White buries him.

* ContinuityNod: Occasionally the spies will reuse previous plans with new twists. Probably the best-known examples are the multiple occurrences of a Spy avoiding death from above by wearing a spring under his hat.

* DisguisedInDrag: One early strip featured the Spies independently coming up with the idea to disguise themselves as women and attack the other Spy when they least expect it. The strip ended with both Spies ''en femme'', standing in the same street corner waiting for the other Spy to turn up.

* DreadfulMusician: One strip had both Spies run into each on the street with [[SenselessViolins violin cases]], and both hurrying to open theirs. White Spy pulled a gun out of his case - Black Spy pulled a regular violin out of his and began chasing White while playing it very poorly.

* EvilIsPetty: One of the ''WesternAnimation/{{MAD}}'' skits has the White Spy apparently breaking into the Black Spy's house on Christmas just to put coal in his stocking. The attempt doesn't pay off for him.

* FalseTeethTomfoolery: Implied whenever they get blown up or killed via a smash to the head, as entire dentures come flying out whole from their mouths.

* TheFarmerAndTheViper: Once, while spying on Black getting berated and apparently fired by his superiors, White gets a rare moment of compassion and decides to approach Black and recruit him to become another White Spy, who was just despairing over being rendered jobless. Black (now also White) then proposes a plan to blow up the Black Embassy with White (the real one) using some TNT, only for him to reveal at the end that this was all a plan to take advantage of Whites kindness and blow him up with the hidden TNT when they enact their plan.

* FilmFelon : In one strip, Black sees a movie set glorifying him and is being shot on the street, with the movie being all about him kicking White's ass. After poisoning the actor playing into puking horribly and calling in sick for the day, he asks the director to hire him to play as himself instead. He gets into position for shooting, and then is shot by White removing his director's disguise and using a gatling gun hidden inside the camera.
* ForegoneConclusion: The title strips at the top of early-to-mid era comics would depict another instance of the two fighting each other, but with a clear victor. Smart readers eventually noticed that the spy who won the title strip would lose the main comic.

* HoistByHisOwnPetard: Happens routinely, usually thanks to one of the spies tinkering with the other's trap.

* JailBake: One strip had Black, acting as a prison guard, make a cake with a nail file inside it for White, his prisoner (passing the cake off as from White's mother). White finds the nail file and uses it to saw through his window's bars... only to realize all too late that the "window" was part of a crushing trap Black had set up.

* MasterOfDisguise: All three spies, being well, spies, are prone to putting on completely convincing disguises to remain hidden. In the case of the male spies, they also manage to hide their {{Sinister Schnoz}}zes despite how tight of a fit their mask would be. To date, they've disguised themselves as women, handymen, newspaper boys, doctors, therapists, dentists, firemen, film directors, opticians, and [[PaletteSwap each other.]]

* MaximumCapacityOverload: 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).

* SilenceIsGolden: 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.

* StrictlyFormula: Sort of. While the comics themselves were always wacky in the various ways the different spies would beat each other, there was always header art of a Spy vs Spy battle in most of Propias's works. Whoever won the header art would lose the main strip. Unless Grey Spy was involved, anyway.

* TakeThat[=/=]EveryoneKnowsMorse: Antonio Prohías wrote the comic as a coded "Screw you" to UsefulNotes/FidelCastro for attempting to arrest him as a spy for the CIA, by writing "By Prohías" in Morse code.
** As an actual comic gag, one early strip had the Black Spy eavesdropping on White who is apparently tapping out morse code messages over the radio. Black gets some paper and pencil and starts copying everything down, only for the message to become so long and fast that he's buried in papers while still writing. White opens the door to check on him, revealing he had a woodpecker tapping a tree log to screw with Black.
* TamperingWithFoodAndDrink : In two occasions in the earlier strips, White has killed Black by poisoning his drink while being disguised as a barman and by poisoning his rice. In a [[https://youtu.be/F-reFzsoHbE?t=787 title-card-turned-Animated-Adaptation]], He turns the table on this being used on him when he and Black seems to be sharing a table for cups of tea, Black looks away mischievously to pour a dust cloud of poison into White's drink, who has a hidden fan to blow it right back into Black's drink, and Black ends up killing himself through drinking his own poison.

* TogetherInDeath: A non-romantic example, and in a unprinted strip. The Black Spy storms White's house with a squad of his soldiers, who capture and executes him via firing squad to Black's glee. Later, apparently overcome with teary loneliness and missing the time he and White used to spend chasing each other, Black commits suicide with his gun and dies, with the final panel showing Black and Whites spirits happily chasing each other in the afterlife.

* WouldntHitAGirl: Meta-example -- Prohías couldn't bring himself to let the Grey Spy lose because he felt too squeamish about drawing a woman suffering the usual fates of the loser in the comic. Eventually he phased her out because she came across as an InvincibleHero (or InvincibleVillain depending on how you look at it). Bob Clarke and Duck Edwing brought her back for two strips in 1988-89, and Peter Kuper made her into a recurring character.

** In another strip, the White Spy puts miniature bombs into the Black Spy's gloves, and when the Black Spy put them on and then stepped outside, the White Spy played the tuba badly, prombting the Black Spy to plug his hears just before the bombs go off.

* AllPsychologyIsFreudian: In one strip, White has recurring nightmares involving him being killed by Black throwing a knife in front of a building's door. He goes to see a therapist (who looks like Freud himself with beard and a cigar) who explains that many of the objects dreamed about are due to psychological issues: a dysfunctional family (Knife), an inner child alter ego (Black), repressed sexuality (Door), and Social/Religious/Economic stress (Background). White then happily walks out without his weapons and thanks the therapist... who turns out to be a disguised-Black, who then kills white by throwing a knife at him exactly like his dreams entailed.

** A later strip reused this plot only to flip it on its head: White receives another cake in jail (presumably actually from his mom this time), finding not only a nail file but a picture of his cell window with the bars cut off. He slides the nail file under the door, scaring Black into entering the cell to find it seemingly empty with an open window, trying to chase after him but slamming his head into the still-intact window bars that were covered by the picture. White then simply crawls out from under the bed and walks out victorious.

* AmbiguouslyHuman: The titular characters themselves. While they have human-like hands and even human-like feet, they have ''very'' unhuman-like faces that lack ears and look more like plague doctor masks, making them stand out from the more human-like characters.
** {{Averted}} With the Grey spy, [[SexyDimorphism who looks perfectly human]].
** Also averted with the leaders of the Black and White Embassies, who look human as well.

* BlondesAreEvil: As shown in colorized prints of the comics, the Grey Spy is blond and so are Black and White when they style their hair sometimes. The Xbox title also gives Black and White balding blond hair under their hats.

* DeliberatelyMonochrome: The strip's been running in color since 2001, but many depictions and animations of the Spies still portray them in a monochrome world, albeit sometimes with the occasional SplashOfColor.

** Also an element of the ''WesternAnimation/{{MAD}}'' cartoon, which experienced several [[ArtShift Art Shifts]], most notably a stop-motion animation style towards the final seasons. A few of the early ''MAD'' sketches were remakes of ''[=MADtv=]'' sketches. The spies also made cameos in some of the show's other sketches.

* OnePersonBirthdayParty: In one strip, which was later adapted into a ''WesternAnimation/{{MAD}}'' cartoon, the White Spy is forlornly celebrating his birthday alone when he receives a birthday cake from the Black Spy in the mail. After checking for traps and realizing it's real, he cheerfully thanks the Black Spy and lights the candles. [[KickTheDog The Black Spy then fires a heat-seeking missile that homes in on the cakes candles.]]

* OnePersonBirthdayParty: In one strip, which was later adapted into a ''WesternAnimation/{{MAD}}'' sketch, the White Spy is forlornly celebrating his birthday alone when he receives a birthday cake from the Black Spy in the mail. After checking for traps and realizing it's real, he cheerfully thanks the Black Spy and lights the candles. [[KickTheDog The Black Spy then fires a heat-seeking missile that homes in on the cakes candles.]]