A painter who found his subject in the funny pages

In 1961, Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) was a thirty-seven-year-old painter and art teacher whose work nobody much wanted. He had been painting in the going style of the day, a loose, gestural abstraction in the long shadow of Abstract Expressionism (the dominant American movement of the 1950s, all big canvases and visible, emotional brushwork, the artist’s own hand and feeling smeared across the surface). It was the serious thing to do, and Lichtenstein was not making a dent doing it. Then, the story goes, he painted a Disney character for his children, looked at it, and saw a way out. Almost overnight he switched to the most disreputable source material in America: comic strips and advertisements, copied straight, at the scale of fine-art paintings.

This was close to a provocation. The whole point of the comic strip and the ad was that they were throwaway: cheap, mass-printed, glanced at, and binned. They were commercial craft, the opposite of art, beneath the gallery wall by definition. Lichtenstein walked straight at that line. He later put his program bluntly: he was, he said, interested in what would normally be considered the worst aspects of commercial art. Not the prettiest, not the cleverest. The worst. The flattest, cheapest, most disposable printed images the culture produced, taken seriously and made big.

For the picture that would become Whaam!, he reached into exactly that bin. The source is a single panel from a war comic: a story called “Star Jockey,” printed in DC Comics’ All-American Men of War No. 89, cover-dated early 1962. The artist who actually drew that panel was Irv Novick(1916–2004), a working comic-book illustrator turning out war stories on a deadline. (His name matters, and we’ll come back to it, because the question of credit is one of the real arguments around this painting.) The original is a small frame on a newsprint page: a fighter plane firing, an enemy plane exploding, a caption, a sound effect. Cheap ink on cheap paper, meant to be read in a second and forgotten.

Even the source may not be a single hand. Scholars (notably Paul Gravett) read Whaam! as a composite: Novick’s “Star Jockey” supplies the overall layout, but the firing plane is likely drawn from Jerry Grandenetti’s “Wingmate of Doom” in the next issue, and the exploding plane from a Russ Heathdrawing in “Aces Wild,” all stitched together. That is a reading, not a settled fact, so hold it loosely. But it only widens the question waiting at the end of this story: there may be more than one uncredited hand inside the picture.

That is the raw material. Not a myth, not a saint, not a battle out of history, the high subjects fine-art painting had drawn on for centuries. A two-bit war comic, the kind a kid bought for a dime. Lichtenstein’s whole move is what he does with it next: he takes that disposable little frame and treats it as if it were worth thirteen feet of canvas and the seriousness of a history painting.