View to a Schill Dept.

If you are a fan of MAD‘s Spy vs. Spy, or know someone who is, put Spy vs. Spy: Omnibus on your Christmas list.

10 years ago, MAD put out Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook, which features all 247 Spy vs. Spy’s Antonio Prohias did for MAD, plus all the other articles he wrote/drew for the magazine as well as essays, interviews, preliminaries and sketches, his early Pre-MAD work and a bunch more fun stuff. It’s a great book, but one aspect of it was disappointing… many of the Spy vs Spy strips were printed much smaller than the originally appeared (about 25%…as in four to a page).

Spy vs. Spy: Omnibus corrects this, printing all the material from The Complete Casebook but at full size, and throws in a few other extras like a gallery of tribute illustrations from other notable artists, additional sketches and roughs. It’s also printed on much nicer paper and in hardcover. Having all 247 of Prohias’ Spy vs. Spy in their full-size glory is worth picking this up even if you have The Complete Casebook. If you don’t own that one, then get this one because it is the BOMB… pun intended.