Spy Vs. Spy

This fall the books that fly off the shelves each week are the compilations of Spy Vs. Spy. These wordless cartoons, featuring two figures who are identical except that one is dressed in white and one in black, depict the antics of an everlasting feud in which each tries to booby-trap the other. The spies usually alternate between victory and defeat with each cartoon strip. Created by Cuban exile Antonio Prohias with a debut in Mad Magazine in 1961, the political satire was Prohias' response to death threats from Fidel Castro. Prohias noted, "The sweetest revenge has been to turn Fidel's accusation of me as a spy into a moneymaking venture."

Of course, the five to eight year old boys who clamor for these books have no clue about the Cold War or Fidel. They just like the action and the fact that, as a wordless book, one can "read" without reading words. The value in Spy Vs. Spy, as in all wordless books, is that children generate mental language from the images and develop in their ability to read sequences, make inferences and develop predictions.

So I had to buy the little plastic action figures when I saw them online. The children love fiddling with them at the check-out desk and invariably tell me how incredibly lucky I am to have them. One little boy made a troubling inference, however, saying
"Oh yeah, the black one is always bad and the white one is always good." My spur of the moment answer, hoping that this comment was not connected to race was, "No, they're both equal and I think they're both crazy." I admit, helping children find Spy vs. Spy is not what I thought I would be doing back when I was writing about Henry James in graduate school. But I'll do a lot to create a new reader.

A ridiculous sample. Click here if the embed doesn't work.