Communist Cartoons

(reprinted from a previous thread)
I just finished reading the complete SPY VS. SPY (from Mad Magazine) by Antonio Prohias. In all seriousness, Prohias had an interesting life, he was a political cartoonist in cuba, and he did a lot of funny communist strips, mosty involving a hammer and sickle somehow messing with a character or not so subtly hidden somewhere in the strips (which were wordless) until Castro came admitted he was a communist (i guess he denied it for the first few years of his reign) then he put a price on Prohias's head, so he fled to the USA by airplane (this was before it was made hard for people to leave cub.) In the usa he sent for his family, and literally walked into the offices of Mad Magazine with his portfolio, and his spy vs. spy strip he had created for the magazine, and was hired on the spot as a freelancer with his 14 year old daughter translating for him (and she barely spoke english either.) and what was intended to be a one or two time gig for Prohias turned out to last him pretty much until the rest of his life (due to health he was forced to retire, and the strip was taken over by other writers and illustrators where it continues. So there's the story in a nutshell, but Spy VS. Spy played off the cold war paranoia of the era, and the inept spies always trying to one up each other was a pretty strong metaphor for it also.

These were originally in spanish, but the captions have been translated to english.

















Tovarich is a russian word which basically mean COMRADE