I’ve always wondered that - what are they supposed to be caricatures of?
Not to be rude, but it doesn’t really explain the pointy faces in that article. Or did I miss something? 
Well, why does any cartoon character anywhere look the way it does? It was the artistic vision of the cartoonist that created the strip. What else are you really hoping for here?
I never thought that the images were caricatures of any particular persons or ideology; their absolute antithesis (black vs. white) was simply a witness to the often unthinking opposition of the forces involved in the Cold War.
I suspect that the pointy noses were simply a style used by Prohias, but I have not been able to find any of his work from his days in Cuba to confirm this.
Perhaps someone in Cafe Society will be able to provide further information.
Well, mostly the fact that they don’t even look human - I was just wondering if there was something more to it.
Excessively angular characters are totally logical when their motivations are exclusively hostile.
Soft, round = nurturing, friendly.
Hard, angular = destructive, hostile.
That, and you can totally crank out panel after panel in between cranking out panel after panel.
Except that your hypothesis fails when tested against SpongeBob who is angular, but is a totally friendly toon person.
Look at his face though. Round eyes, round nose (biggie) very organic mouth. Plus he’s covered in circles :).
I believe Squidward may disagree with you on that.
And he’s a SPONGE; unless his name were CashmereBob SquareScarf you can’t get much softer.
Bluto, however, is a different story…
Maybe you can find out here if you can find it.
His other work for Mad–what little there was of it–had conventional faces on the characters. (For that matter, so did the occasional supporting characters in Spy vs. Spy itself, including the gray spy.) As for his Cuban work, Mad ran a few examples of a strip called “Tovarich”–again, normal cartoon faces.
I thought they were birds.
So did I.
By the way, has anyone been so obsessive as to compile stats on which spy has the most “kills” over the run of the strip? I was under the impression, Prohias tried to keep it 50/50 but I could be wrong.
I remember a letter to the editors at Mad Magazine from a detail-minded reader who pointed out the the fights went for the white spy, about 60-40.
They ridiculed him, of course.
This doesn’t count the gray spy, who routinely won every battle that involved her.
I always thought they were supposed to look like rats or weasels, because weasels and rats are sneaky, like spies.
I always thought it was done to make them look funny. Obviously, that can’t be the explanation. :rolleyes:
As a long-time reader of Mad, I just wanted to agree with this. Way back in the early 1960s, Prohias did other strips for MAD. Most were one-time-only strips (“Revenge”), and others looked like attempts as another continuing feature (“The Ambassador”), but most of them didn’t have pointy-nosed characters like the Spies. As Biffy points out, even the Gray Spy didn’t look like that – she was a sexy, very human female.
As far as I can recall, The Ambassador was the only other Prohias character to have en excessively pointy nose. And even he wasn’t as bad as the White Spy and the Gray Spy.
You have to admit that they’re great creations – simply drawn, easily recognizable, familiar and cute. Other artists snuck them into their strips now and then, like Mort Drucker in his "Man from U.N.C.L.E. oparody, or Al Jaffee in his piece on Madison Avenue and sneak product packaging. But you saw less and less of it as time went by.
My favorite Spy vs Spy:
Black Spy paints himself white to look like the White Spy, with the idea that nobody would be able to tell them apart.
Meanwhile, White Spy paints himself black to look like the Black Spy, with the same premise.
They encounter each other, but since each is painted like each other’s foe, they get incredibly confused. The next panel shows both of them lying in a psychiastrist’s chair, looking very much upset and confused 