A killing, painted like an advertisement

Stand at the left end, where the action starts. A fighter plane cuts diagonally down across the left canvas, and a rocket streaks away from it on a long trail of smoke. This is the cause: the trigger pulled, the shot fired. (Spotters argue about the plane. The source comic shows an F-86 Sabre; popular write-ups often call it a P-51 Mustang. The exact model was never the point.) The whole left panel is built around that one clean diagonal of fire, aimed across the gap at the next canvas.

Now read the box along the top. A yellow caption box runs across the upper edge of the left panel, carrying the pilot’s line in black hand-lettering, kept almost exactly from the comic: “I pressed the fire control… and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky…”This is the comic’s narrative voice, the breathless first-person of a war story, lifted intact and blown up to gallery scale. The words are part of the picture, not a label on the wall, and they do something sly: they hand you the drama in print, so the image itself doesn’t have to act it out.

Walk to the right canvas and the rocket arrives. The enemy plane erupts in a red-and-yellow fireball that fills the panel. This is the effect, and it is worth saying plainly what it depicts: a man is being killed, his aircraft blown apart in the air. But look at how it is painted. There is no gore, no twisted metal, no smoke-blackened horror, just a clean, bright, almost cheerful graphic burst in flat primary color. The deadliest thing in the picture is rendered like a logo.

And over the top of it detonates the painting’s title. The giant onomatopoeia “WHAAM!” bursts across the upper right in bold yellow-edged comic lettering, the sound effect drawn as a picture, the way comics have always done it. The word is doing the work the image refuses to: it supplies the noise, the violence, the punch, all of it kept safely in lettering. The title of the painting is painted into the painting.

Step back and take in the whole thirteen feet. What you are looking at is a scene of sudden death rendered with total cool: flat color, hard outlines, mechanical dots, not a flicker of feeling in the paint. This is the deadpan that is the content. Lichtenstein takes the most violent kind of imagery, war, killing, an aircraft exploding with a man inside it, and drains it of all drama in the handling, presenting it with the same flat, bright neutrality an advertisement uses to sell soap. The painting does not mourn the death or thrill to it. It just shows you how completely a culture had learned to package even killing as a clean, disposable graphic. The flatness is not a failure of feeling. It is the point.