I always preferred the black spy.

I know, I know, it makes no rational sense. The black and white spies are identical except for the color of their clothes. Perhaps it was simply an early manifestation of my own preference for wearing dark colors. Or maybe it was my innate sympathy for the underdog shining through; I have no empirical evidence to support this, but it always seemed to me that the white spy was victorious more often than his black counterpart.

OK, it doesn't really matter. I just wanted to make my bias known.

When I was a very young child, much of the satire in MAD Magazine went right over my head. Many of the movie spoofs were beyond my grasp because I hadn't seen the movies; besides, a lot of the humor was geared for a slightly older audience than my tender self. But I always flipped through the pages eagerly anyway, looking for a few select features that always earned a grin. Spy vs Spy was one of them.

Back then, I didn't know -- and probably wouldn't have cared -- that creator/artist Antonio Prohias was a Cuban national who fled to America after Fidel Castro, who apparently didn't have a sense of humor and didn't like the political cartoons Prohias drew, threatened his life.

All I knew was he drew silly little wordless strips in which two spies contended for military supremacy and tried constantly to steal each other's secret documents. Their efforts always fell somewhere between ludicrous and ingenious, and it was always a treat to watch them succeed or fail, in either case spectacularly.

Sometimes, the losing spy got nothing more harmful than a boot to the rear. In other cases, he might be decapitated, mutilated or blown up. Some examples:

• The black spy creates an elaborate Holmes vs Dracula scenario in miniature just to lure his opponent into driving a stake into a booby-trapped grave.

• The white spy removes all the floors in a tall embassy building so that when the black spy climbs in a top-floor window, he falls to his death.

• When the black spy invents a potion to turn himself invisible so he can kick the white spy in the butt, the white spy alters the formula so only his counterpart's clothes disappear, getting him arrested.

• The white spy poses as a car salesman to get the black spy into an elaborate and indestructible tank that is really a giant slingshot.

You'll also love the way the black spy traps the white spy into a marriage with a witch, and the white spy tricks the black spy into turning his submarine upside-down, among others. You'll often be hard pressed to guess if a spy's cunning plan will work, or if the other spy will foil it with an even more cunning counterplan.

Spy vs Spy is certainly not high-brow entertainment, having more in common with Looney Tunes than James Bond, but it never fails to amuse. These collections were first published in slightly different form and with different titles in the late 1960s and '70s; after being almost impossible to find for so many years, I am glad to see these long out-of-print volumes reissued for a modern audience.