History ComicStrip / SpyVsSpy

** For ''Series/{{MADtv}}'' sketches. They follow the scripts of various strips to the letter most of the time.

* BeautyIsNeverTarnished: The female Grey Spy was never defeated. A self-admitted example by Prohías, who eventually found her [[ImmuneToSlapstick Immunity To Slapstick]] rather boring.

** 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: Played with.

** In another strip, the White Spy puts miniature bombs into the Black Spy's gloves, and when the Black Spy puts them on and then steps outside, the White Spy plays the tuba badly, prompting the Black Spy to plug his ears just before the bombs go off.

* PaletteSwap: 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. Lampshaded in one strip where the spies paint themselves in each other's colors without the other's knowledge to pull a trick... and then run into the other spy, who now looks like themselves. This either confuses them so badly or causes a big enough existential crisis that they ''both'' have to go see a psychiatrist. The same one. At the same time.

* TheyKilledKennyAgain: Black and White repeatedly kill each other, but never fail to return to the pages.

* 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 White's kindness and blow him up with the hidden TNT when they enact their plan.

* AchievementsInIgnorance: Two MAD Magazine Sunday strips has two instances of the White Spy defeating the Black Spy by complete accident:
** First one is the Black Spy attempting to sabotage the White Spy's morning routine, first by replacing his alarm clock with a bomb. White narrowly avoids it, and makes a cup of coffee. He then trips on a wire trap set by Black, but splashes the coffee into Black in the process. Blinded, Black frantically makes a run for it and accidentally trips on the window frame and fall to his death, which [[WinsByDoingAbsolutelyNothing White looks over in complete confusion.]]
** Another has the Black Spy coat himself in a chemical that renders him invisible and infiltrates the White Spy's base, who is developing a heat-seeking missile project. The missiles recognize Black's heat signature and immediately fire on him, much to White's surprise since he didn't know Black was there in the first place.

* 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.

* 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. This is made stranger with the Grey Spy, the White and Black leaders and random extras looking perfectly human, making Black and White's stylistic appearances anomalies.

* ArchEnemy: Black and White's beef has ''decades'' of history and they are constantly trying to one-up each other.

** Peter Kuper makes the SinisterSchnoz angled to look more like their noses than an entire cone for a head. Once the magazine switched back to color, he also gave them realistically colored skin.
* TheArtifact: The morse code message in the title panel, which spells out '''"By Prohías"''', was kept after Antonio Prohías retired in 1987. All of the subsequent artists have used it as well.
* BackwardsFiringGun: Occurs in one strip drawn for a series of paperbacks, where Black is enjoying some target practice alone but left his sniper rifle unattended while he sets up new targets. White, seizing the opportunity, takes the gun and takes aim at Black while he begs for his life, only for the gun barrel to actually be the scope White is looking through, making him shoot himself in the face while Black stops pretending to be scared so he can celebrate.
* BaldnessAngst: In one strip, Black worries that he's going to be bald after accidentally pulling a hair out in the bathroom. He decides to go to a barber wanting to test a new hair growth serum. However, the barber turns out to be White having poured fast growing serum on his head with the intent to overwhelm and strangle Black with his overgrown hair... but the tables are turned when the hair White has combed from Black were fuses to an explosive hair comb. As insult to injury, Black celebrates his victory while getting his fast growing hair under control and shaves it into a stylish pompadour.

** 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 face-first and knocks himself out while White sits back and laughs.
** In a later strip, Black is tanning once again while White shows to up to screw with him by using a mirror to focus the sun into a heat ray to burn his back. Black, expecting this, has his picnic basket spawn a network of mirrors to reflect and super-heat the sun beam back at White and scorch him to dust.
** In a strip drawn by Kuper, White is relaxing on the beach when an inexplicably ripped Black kicks sand into his face, intimidates him into walking away and embarrasses him in front of a bunch of girls. Cue White [[TrainingMontage looking into body building and training for weeks to get buff enough to fight Black]], he returns to the same spot at the beach and sees Black relaxing in some sand. White goes to kick it in his face, only for him to notice that it's a decoy and he's just walked over quick sand. Cue White sinking and asphyxiating to death while Black is in the background watching and laughing.
* BeautyIsNeverTarnished: The female Grey Spy was never defeated. A self admitted example by Prohías, who eventually found her [[ImmuneToSlapstick Immunity To Slapstick]] rather boring.

** When setting up a series of traps to kill Black, White is seen reading a book about conditioning behavior when Black shows up to the gauntlet. He effortlessly avoids two lethal traps by swinging on tree branches while White is left seething in his hiding spot. When Black hits the final trap, he grabs the tree branch, which has been hollowed out, it slides half the tree into the ground and smashes his head between it and the tree branch.
** While reading a book based off the Pavlovian Response, Black gets the idea to attach bells to his clubs and smash White's head in with them three times in one day when he least expects it. When White goes to the hospital to get his mangled head treated, the nearby bell tower goes off, reminding him of all the times Black smashed his head in and rang a bell while doing it. His body suffers an involuntary reaction so severe that [[BodyHorror the top of his head breaks out gigantic bruises]], and the pain is so intense he's knocked out instantly.

* BloodierAndGorier: Initially kept in check by the rules of BloodlessCarnage and cartoon violence, but ever since Peter Kuper took over, many of the gags have become a lot more visceral with blood splatter and cartoonish gore being commonplace.

* {{Bookworm}}: White's been shown to explicitly be one, with multiple strips having him buried nose-deep into books he's reading. What keeps it from him being a BadassBookworm however is that it's been used against him ''every time''.

** While reading a book outside waiting for the bus, Black peeks out his window and gets the idea to pack a saw and stand next to White. White is so immersed in his book that he doesn't notice Black standing right next to him by the stop, sitting next to him on the bus, doesn't notice him sawing the handlebars off while they're getting out, leading him to the edge of a cliff and tossing him to his death.
** While White is reading the Frog and the Princess at the park, Black gets the idea to contact a local hag of a witch in the woods and tell her about his plan. She happily goes along and curses herself into becoming a frog, to which Black carefully places her and some attractive clothes on a bench, runs around in a witches broom handle so White can see him acting like he's in a fairy tale and lures him into finding the frog and clothing. Thinking back to the book he just read, he gives the frog a big kiss thinking he's found a princess, only for him to break the frog's curse and find out he's just made a fat ugly witch fall in love with him. Cut later, and White's miserably coming out of a church after being forcibly married to the witch, who's lustfully carrying him to their car while Black, the best man at the marriage, is just barely holding back his laughter.
** In ''another'' strip, White is so distracted reading a book at the park that he doesn't notice Black bribing his son ([[UncannyFamilyResemblance ?]]) with a lollipop to smack him over the head with a toy shovel. It doesn't do anything but enrage him, it ''does'' lead to him falling for a second trap by Black soon after.
* BrokeEpisode: When Black is in need of quick cash, he's hired by a businessman selling glasses in a part-time employment agency as a human billboard. When Black walks outside to advertise, the bill slips from the board revealing it to be a bullseye... right when Black is next to an artillery range and White reveal he was disguised as his new boss, who watches as Black is shot to death by soldiers in the firing range.

** In the ending of ''Danger! Intrigue! Stupidity!'', 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.

* CementShoes: While White is trying out some new metal boots he invented that let him walk on water, Black sees him and runs up to mug him at gunpoint so he can steal them. When White takes them off and Black takes them, he tries to walk on water as well only for him to suddenly get dragged down to the water floor, revealing White was just hopping on stone pillars and Black just put on magnetic boots, which stick him underneath as he drowns to death.
* CharacterizationMarchesOn: [[https://usualgangofidiots.tumblr.com/image/100485361773 In the first comic strip,]] the spies are FriendlyEnemies, who might try to poison each other, but don't bear any ill-will over it. [[https://usualgangofidiots.tumblr.com/image/155657856618 In the second comic strip, their established rivalry took off to a start]], but they didn't always kill each other, as some comic strips had them merely pulling pranks on each other. As time went on, when they evolved to their more refined designs, the spies became gradually became even more hostile against each other and became more unscrupulous, if still only towards each other. When Peter Kuper started making the Spy Vs. Spy comics in Phobias' place, their brutality and hostility went up even further!

** 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.
** The final strip in the first paperback book "The All New MAD Secret File on Spy vs. Spy" featured Black Spy encountering a open cemetery dedicated to him. When he goes over in confusion, he finds that the tombstone lists all the times he won over White Spy in the previous parts of the book, causing him to chuckle. Of course, this was a trap by the White Spy to [[BuriedAlive bury him alive]].

* DeadHatShot: It is common to see one of the Spies' wide-brimmed hats lazily floating back down or on the surface of water after some sort of catastrophic explosion. This was most common during Prohías' run, as an easy and bloodless shorthand for 'yes, this particular Spy is dead, on to the next strip.'

* 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, save for the occasional SplashOfColor.
* DeliveryGuyInfiltration: Although both spies are [[MasterOfDisguise masters of disguises]], it's Black who seems to use this trope more often, often overlapping with JanitorImpersonationInfiltration. He has disguised himself as mailmen/delivery men to steal documents/give a booby trapped parcel to White, a plumber/handyman to screw with White's toilet/booby trap his home.

** In another strip, later adapted into a ''Series/{{MADtv}}'' cartoon, the Black Spy builds and programs a robotic girlfriend after losing his previous lover to the White Spy. Then comes a woman-disguised White to seduce Black and enrage his robot girlfriend into attacking and pummeling him while White makes a getaway.
* DisneyVillainDeath: Sometimes the losing spy dies from falling.

* DoubleSubversion[=/=]CrazyPrepared: How every single strip plays out.
* 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.

** In yet another strip, the Black Spy badly plays the violin so the White Spy gets the bow caught in a slingshot and then flings the Black Spy out the window.
** In ''yet another strip,'' the Black Spy, disguised as a hippie, badly plays the flute, which prompts the White Spy to start attacking him, before being obliterated by a rocket shaped like the Peace symbol.
* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: The early comics were more prone to either spy winning in a non-lethal way, like by making a clean getaway or by humiliating each other. The very first gag, for example, had both spies trying to poison each other. ''Neither one died'' (although a pair of cats that were unlucky enough to consume the poison on the ground did)!

** 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.

** Another strip had the Black Spy sculpting a bust of the White Spy's head and hat in front of his fan club - which turned out to be toilet.

** 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.

* GadgeteerGenius: If there's one skill all three Spies have shown through their decades of print runs, it's an absurdly gifted ability to build basically any weapon, trap and machine meant to defeat the other Spy. Other times, though, their gear is as simple as party horn that'll snatch papers or a desk fan that'll blow away whatever's been sent for them.

* GambitRoulette: A particularly notable example is the black spy staging his own decommissioning from his embassy in an elaborate scheme to kill the white spy.
* TheGamePlaysYou: In one strip, the Black Spy spots a physical arcade game called ''Kill the White Spy'' with two tiny models of himself and the White Spy in a plastic box. Inevitably, he decides to put a coin in, and watches with delight as the tiny Black Spy clubs the tiny White Spy over the head... whereupon the tiny White Spy falls through a hole in the bottom of the machine and lands on the floorboard on which the Black Spy is standing, launching him up into the air where the tiny Black Spy, having also been launched up and out of the machine, clubs his giant counterpart to death with a grin.[[note]] The full size White Spy is nowhere to be seen, though we can assume he designed the machine as yet another trap for the Black Spy.[[/note]]

* GreyAndGrayMorality: Neither spy is portrayed as good ''or'' evil, since both of them are equally ruthless towards each other. Their moral alignments are a matter of fan interpretation.

* IdenticalGrandson: They've got ancestors who've kept the rivalry up ever since they were pre-historic cavemen, Roman soldiers, newborn babies and up to the present as secret agents. Even then, they're sometimes revealed to have children of their own who look pretty much exactly like them, just without their trench coats.

** 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 [[FakeoutEscape 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.

* LaserGuidedKarma: In one instance, Black stops White from sleeping by using a watch's tick tock to keep him up all night. The poor exhausted Spy then goes to an hypnotist who cures him by using the same watch... and steals his suitcase, with the hypnotist turning out to be Black. But as he opens it, he finds his watch tied to a timebomb and a bundle of TNT, which sets it off into exploding soon after.
* LatexPerfection: They'll often disguise themselves as other people to trick or kill the other Spy. What really brings this trope into action though is that their ''long and gigantic noses'' have no trouble whatsoever being molded into normal head shapes.
* LoudOfWar: When the White Spy held a geisha lady at gunpoint and had her sneak a microphone onto the Black Spy, who was headed to a party at the Black Embassy, she warns the whole party with an emergency video call that White's listening in on them with a headset with a microphone hidden in Black's pin. Black and the rest of the party promptly gather all the trumpets and tubas, surround the now removed microphone and begin playing absurdly loudly into while everyone else also screams as loud as they can into it. Outside, [[YourHeadAsplode White's head has exploded into a bunch of pieces from the sheer volume of it all.]]
* LudicrousGibs: 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.

** Another strip had the Black Spy carrying a missile that kept falling apart behind him as the White Spy collects the pieces to assemble and steal it himself. The White Spy builds the entire missile and falls to his death when he crosses a wooden bridge that breaks under his weight.
* MeleeATrois: Assuming these guys each fight for a given nation like real life spies do, it can be inferred that this trope is going on between White's, Black's, and Grey's nations.

** 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.
** Same could be said for the White Spy in "Defection". When he thought the Black spy lost his job and was down on his luck, he felt sorry for him and decided to help him... only for the Black spy to turn on him and blow him up with dynamite.

* OutGambitted: Currently provides the image for the main page. 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 case. He puts a bomb in an identical case, puts it down next to the Black Spy, and [[SatchelSwitcheroo picks up the other case]]... only to discover that the Black Spy bolted it to the paving slab, so that the White Spy picks up ''both'' cases and gets blown up by his own bomb.

* SadistShow: Neither Spy are particularly good people, and they rarely take pleasure in anything other than brutalizing their rival. It's entertaining to watch and read through with how creative the plans get.

** 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.

* SinisterSchnoz: Their most distinguishing feature would be their heads, which are shaped like elongated cones. {{Averted}} with the grey spy, [[SexyDimorphism who, again, looks perfectly human.]]

** 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 the comics themselves, neither Spy was willingly to try and attack Grey or were too busy fawning over her or baited in her traps to actually lay a finger. In Kuper's run of the comics though, they at least got bold enough to sometimes try to steal from and sabotage her ([[ForegoneConclusion not that they got any closer to beating her]]).
* XanatosGambit: Related to the above. While the Grey Spy always won, she was for that very reason eventually phased out of the comic entirely. Considering how the Black and White spies can't perma-kill each other maybe they lost on purpose.
* XylophoneGag: 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.

* DeathIsASlapOnTheWrist: 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 ([[LuckBasedMission 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 A.I. -- 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.

* PieInTheFace: EveryEpisodeEnding in the much LighterAndSofter ''Spy vs Spy Jr.'', which ran for a short time in ''Mad Kids''.

* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: The computer will never lose the knife (first game and all ports except the UsefulNotes/GameBoyColor) 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)

** A quick blackout segment on an episode of ''WesternAnimation/RobotChicken'', where the White Spy sets up a spring-loaded boxing glove in a vending machine. [[WhyDontYouJustShootHim The Black Spy just walks up behind him and shoots him in the head]] to steal his documents.
** A brief gag in ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'', in which both Spies are sitting peacefully on a couch together and bluntly say that they've resolved their differences.

* BackwardsFiringGun: Occurs in one strip drawn for a series of paperbacks.

** First one is the Black Spy attempting to sabotage the White Spy's morning routine, first by replacing his alarm clock with a bomb. White narrowly avoids it, and makes a cup of coffee. He then trips on a wire trap set by Black, but splashes the coffee into Black in the process. Blinded, Black frantically makes a run for it and accidentally trips on the window frame and fall to his death, which White looks over in complete confusion.

* FemmeFatale: The Grey spy.

!!The games provide examples of the following tropes:

[[caption-width-right:220:[-"The UsefulNotes/ColdWar may be over, but the Lukewarm War rages on!"-] ]]

!!''Spy vs. Spy'' provides examples of the following tropes:

* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: The early comics were more prone to either spy winning in a non-lethal way, like by making a clean getaway or by humiliating each other. The very first gag, for example, had both spies trying to poison each other. ''Neither one died''!

* HangingAround: Subverted. One animated short has one of the spies obliging the other to build a gallows at gunpoint. When the spy has the noose around the other spy’s neck and pulls the lever to drop him through the trapdoor, it instead causes the actual gibbet to drop and clock the would-be hangman on the head.

* 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.

* CharacterizationMarchesOn: [[https://usualgangofidiots.tumblr.com/image/100485361773 In the first comic strip, neither of the two spies had any animosity towards each other.]] [[https://usualgangofidiots.tumblr.com/image/155657856618 In the second comic strip, their established rivalry took off to a start]], but they didn't always kill each other, as some comic strips had them merely pulling pranks on each other. As time went on, when they evolved to their more refined designs, the spies became gradually became even more hostile against each other and became more unscrupulous, if still only towards each other. When Peter Kuper started making the Spy Vs. Spy comics in Phobias' place, their brutality and hostility went up even further!

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 end of Mad's publication run in 2020, the strip was drawn and almost always written by Peter Kuper.

* NoGoodDeedGoesUnpunished

* TheTelevisionTalksBack

* TimedMission

* XRaySparks