I remember reading a letter where a reader noticed the same thing. Prohias admitted that he probably favored the white spy because he was easier to draw.This will show my ignorance, but I had no idea that there was a comic of Spy Vs. Spy. I just knew it from the old Nintendo game. I liked the game, for the record.
I loved that game! I used to play it on the C-64.
The spies are purposely non-human and exactly alike in order to be generic and without bias. You can’t guess their ethnicity or nationality, they don’t have one. Basically, the same reason for the 50-50 win ratio.
I’ve never seen one of the Grey Lady toons. (And I still don’t know what’s up with the soda ads.)
Aside from the look’s singularity and graphic impact, Prohias was possibly inspired by Venetian Carnival masks, capes, and hats:
From Festivals.com: “One of the more traditional Carnival costume consists of a long black cloak called a tabarro, and a bauto, a white partial-mask with a long, pointy nose. A black hood made of silk or lace covers the head and shoulders and the disguise is topped off with a three-cornered hat. It is still worn today.”
check out one style of Medieval-pointy hats (top pic, left), very different (but also rather Prohias-like) from the traditional tri-cornered hat associated with Venetian Carnival.
A pic of a pointy bird-beak mask (scroll to second-from-bottom). (Also note that although the hats vary tremendously in style, size and shape, that many are wide-brimmed, although topped with feathers, boa feathers, lace, etc., as opposed to Prohias’ spies’ hats having a more clean-lined, modern look.)
Here’s a listing of dozens of established Carnival roles from the 18th C.: “street assassin” is one of the personnae (no pics of these various roles, though). Another role is listed as “plague doctor” … which this pic’s caption suggests is signified by the familiar “bird mask” (nice pic of masks). [This makes sense: going from memory here, wasn’t the beak originally filled with pungent potpourri, or perfumed cloth, or whatnot, during the actual plagues?]
Where Prohias’ spies break with the classic Carnival look is in their hats. Prohias drew his spies’ hats as a sort of flamboyantly modified homburg, with a masculine, modern crown and band, but a wildly exaggerated, feminine brim. The brim is so wide, it suggests the hats worn by rice peasants in Indochina. It also recalls the stylish hat which Audrey Hepburn wore, paired with the perfect black dress and accessorized with a long cigarette holder, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Oddly enough, “Breakfast” was made in 1961, the same year Prohias’ “Spy vs. Spy” debuted in MAD. Perhaps there was a fashion trend using a sort of black-and-white minimalism and angularity in general, that was becoming popular then…
Yep, I’m in the same camp. I’d never even thought about it before, they just look like…um…birds to me.
Ever since the Cold War ended, the spying biz ain’t what it used to be. Gotta get a paycheck somehow.
I hated it. What the hell was the point of it?
And that stupid boxing glove on the spring… grar.
To make them –
[ul]
[li]simple to draw[/li][li]distinct in appearance from any other characters that might appear in the strip, therefore focusing attention on them[/li][li]Hi Opal![/li][li]To make them utterly indistinguishable from each other, except for the arbitrary coloration. Prohas was trying to say that you can’t tell one group of viscious men from another without a scorecard.[/li][/ul]