How a comic panel becomes thirteen feet of canvas

Lichtenstein did not simply enlarge Novick’s panel like a photocopy. He rebuilt it. The first big decision was structural: he took the single comic frame and split it into a diptych, two separate canvases (the word just means a picture made of two joined panels). The firing plane went on the left canvas, the explosion on the right, and the rocket’s smoke trail was stretched across the gap between them to tie the two halves into one action. That split is not in the comic. It is Lichtenstein pulling the cause and the effect apart and giving each its own wall-sized field, so the eye has to travel from the trigger to the blast.

Then there is the size. The finished work is roughly five feet eight inches tall and thirteen feet four inches wide overall(the two panels together), about thirteen feet of canvas. That is mural scale, the scale an old academic painter reserved for a coronation or a battle. A throwaway comic panel, meant to be inches across on a newsprint page, is here blown up until it dominates a room. The simple act of enlargement is half the work: at that size the cheap graphic clichés of the comic stop being invisible and become the subject.

Up close, the surface is a careful imitation of cheap printing. Everything is reduced to flat primary color (red, yellow, blue) inside thick black outlines, with no modelling, no shadow, no shading, the visual economy of a comic page. The paint is mostly Magna, an early solvent-based acrylic resin (a forerunner of the water-based acrylics painters use now), worked alongside ordinary oil. It dries flat and even, with none of the loaded, expressive brushwork Lichtenstein had just walked away from. The hand is gone on purpose.

And then the part everyone gets wrong. Across the flat color areas runs a regular grid of dots, the texture you see if you put a comic page under a magnifying glass. These are Ben-Day dots, named for the 19th-century printer Benjamin Day: a mechanical dot-screen used to shade and tint cheap printing without paying for more ink. In a real comic the dots are printed, stamped on by a press. In Whaam! they are painted by hand. Lichtenstein laid down each field of dots himself, dabbing or scrubbing paint through a perforated metal screen held against the canvas, the way you’d use a stencil. The single most mechanical-looking thing in the painting, the dot, is the most laborious hand-work in it. The picture only looks machine-printed. It was made slowly, by hand, to fake the machine.