Whaam!

A throwaway war-comic panel, blown up to thirteen feet and hand-painted dot for dot: a fighter fires a rocket, the enemy plane bursts into a yellow-and-red “WHAAM!”, and a picture of a man being killed is rendered as clean, bright, deadpan as an advertisement.

1. 1
   Two panels, one action

   The whole work: a left canvas and a right canvas, hung side by side with a seam between them

   This is a diptych, two separate canvases shown as one picture. Read it left to right: the firing plane on the left, the explosion on the right. The rocket’s long smoke trail is what stitches the two halves together, carrying your eye across the gap. Lichtenstein took a single comic frame and split it in two, so the cause sits on one canvas and the effect on the other.
2. 2
   The firing plane (left)

   The left panel, a fighter aircraft cutting diagonally down across the canvas

   A fighter plane angles down from the upper left, a rocket streaking away from it. This is the cause, the trigger pulled. (Which plane it is depends on who you ask: the source comic shows an F-86 Sabre, while popular descriptions often call it a P-51 Mustang, so the exact model is not worth asserting.) What matters is the clean diagonal: the whole left canvas is built around that single line of fire shooting toward the next panel.
3. 3
   The exploding plane (right)

   The right panel, the enemy aircraft erupting in a red-and-yellow fireball

   The enemy plane bursts into a red-and-yellow fireball that fills the right canvas. This is the effect, and it is a man being killed, but you would never know it from the handling: there is no gore, no smoke-blackened wreckage, just a clean graphic explosion in flat primary color. The horror of the subject and the cheerfulness of the picture are the whole tension of the work.
4. 4
   The word “WHAAM!”

   Across the upper right panel, the giant onomatopoeia in bold yellow-and-black lettering

   The blast is spelled out, comic-book style, in a huge yellow-edged “WHAAM!” detonating across the top of the right panel. The painting’s title is literally painted into the painting. Lichtenstein keeps the comic’s own device, the sound effect drawn as a picture, and lets it carry the violence the image refuses to.
5. 5
   The yellow caption box (left)

   Along the top edge of the left panel, a boxed line of hand-lettered text

   Across the top of the left panel runs a caption box carrying the pilot’s line, kept from the comic almost word for word: “I PRESSED THE FIRE CONTROL … AND AHEAD OF ME ROCKETS BLAZED THROUGH THE SKY …” It is the comic’s narrative voice, the breathless first-person of a war story, lifted intact and blown up to gallery scale. The text is part of the picture, not a label on it.
6. 6
   The hand-painted Ben-Day dots

   Anywhere across the flat color areas, especially the lighter passages of sky

   Look at the even areas of color and you will see a regular grid of dots. These are Ben-Day dots, the cheap printer’s dot-screen used to shade newsprint, named for the printer Benjamin Day. The crucial thing: here they are not printed. Lichtenstein laid every one down by hand, dabbing paint through a perforated metal screen, to imitate the look of mass reproduction. The most mechanical-looking surface in the painting is the most hand-made part of it.