From Stu West:
I was at a bookstore event recently and heard a novelist talking about one of his influences, the "Spy vs. Spy" comic strip from MAD magazine. He mentioned that the strip was originated by Antonia Prohias, a Cuban cartoonist who came to the United States to escape the Castro regime. I had no idea, and it sounds like an interesting bit of history. Did you know Prohias, and do you have any stories about him?
I met Señor Prohias a grand total of once and learned almost nothing about him from him. This was because he did not speak English very well…and if my amigo Sergio Aragonés is to believed (and I always believe him) Prohias did not even speak Spanish all that well.
But it is quite true that he was a cartoonist in Cuba who placed his life in jeopardy by drawing anti-Castro cartoons. He fled Cuba in 1960 and never returned, spending the rest of that life he'd saved, living off doing two dozen pages or so of "Spy Vs. Spy" for MAD each year plus the occasional paperback and a few other commercial art jobs.
His is truly a remarkable story and it has been told in some form in most (not all) of the collections of his work that have been published over the last few decades. All of them, alas, seem to be outta print but it wouldn't surprise me if another one comes out before long. If you want to hunt down one, this one is probably the best but it could run you upwards of a hundred bucks in the reseller market. If I were you, I'd wait.
