Barbara Lippert's Critique: The Dew Does It Again

Spy vs. Spy was the one cartoon I consistently skipped as a kid reading Mad magazine—I just didn’t get it, and it scared me. Black-and-white and weirdly flat, it seemed dark and passionately foreign. Why spend time deciphering the murky war between creepy, cone-faced guys in trench coats when there was a Don Martin cartoon right around the corner?

On one level, of course, it is simply Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner in black and white—instead of roads disappearing from under their feet or Acme safes plummeting from the sky to land on their heads, White Spy and Black Spy cross and double-cross each other in increasingly inventive (and elaborately backfiring) ways.