YMMV / Spy vs. Spy

• Fanon: Thanks to the silent and deliberately vague nature of the world the spies live in, fans tend to think of their own theories and headcanons, such as the duo being siblings with an especially violent and hateful relationship, or distinguishing their otherwise identical personalities with whichever consistencies appear in the strips like hobbies and fighting styles. This actually does have some basis during the time Prohías worked on the series, with White being drawn as an avid book reader far more often than Black (to the point of fault), and Black being shown to a dedicated musician far more often than White (also to the point of fault).
• Fan Nickname: While many fans just refer to the spies as Black and White, respectively, in some fanfictions, the black spy is named either "Cloak" or "Joke," and the white spy is "Dagger." This is likely in reference to Mad Magazine's consistent labeling of the strip as "From the Joke and Dagger Dept.", a running gag that has carried on to the title pages of various Spy vs. Spy collections.
• Foe Yay Shipping: On DeviantArt, there are tons of slash art of Black and White.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Foreign editions of the Spy vs Spy paperbacks have sold incredibly well according to the 2001 paperback Spy Vs Spy: The Complete Casebook. The fact that the strip has no dialog helps, relying on Visual Puns and humor.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Spy vs Spy Mountain Dew commercials had really ominous background music cues, mainly consisting of someone manically playing the piano. And on top of that, the spies themselves made some of the creepiest noises you'd ever expect to hear. Either consisting of crazed gibberish, or a haunting moan if one of them died.
  • One of Peter Kuper's early comics in the series had some horrific imagery as the White Spy was sucked into an escalator and graphically torn to shreds. In general, the sheer level of gore in Kuper's strips compared to the more comedic violence of the earlier comics was quite the jarring transition.
• The Scrappy: Grey Spy is widely hated for always winning over both Spies and never getting killed.
• Viewer Species Confusion: The spies are supposedly humans, but due to their carrot-shaped heads that look nothing like that of a human's, some readers/viewers admit to thinking that they were animals of some kind, usually rodents or birds.

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