EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 23 © 2018 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

96 From The Inside: Swiping from comics Swipe (verb) Steal. ‘Someone swiped one of his sausages’. For the above example, we might change the word ‘sausages’ to ‘panels’ or ‘drawings’. The case in point is about swiping from comic books. When the Pop Art movement started in the sixties, one of its many artists to rise to prominence was Roy Lichtenstein. He came up with a brilliant idea of trying to reproduce artwork he saw in cheap comic books, as fully painted canvasses. Actually, what fascinated Lichtensteinwas the way colour was reproduced in these comic books by a series of dots, known in the medium as “Ben-Day dots”. Using just four colours (CMYK), the Ben-Day technique involved printing an image by using regularly-spaced colour dots which could be closely spaced, widely spaced, or even superimposed, to create a full range of tones and secondary colours. In contrast to printer’s half-toning, in which colour is deconstructed into a series of different sized dots with variable spacing, Ben-Day dots are all the same size: this is what Lichtenstein found so interesting. By blowing up the images, Lichtenstein also blew up the size of the “dots”. Using a template with many holes of the same size, he would then apply the colour through them onto the canvas. Clever, but what about the sources for his paintings? Of special interest may be the silver-age comic book All-American Men of War number 89, published by DC Comics in 1962. Being a war comic series, it contained many stories written and drawn anonymously (as was the norm at the time) by many different writers and artists. It might have been the anonymity that piqued Lichtenstein’s interest in using panels he found inside that “cheap” comic book as inspiration for his artwork. After all, comic books were considered low, trashy art, aimed mainly at children, and with no artistic value whatsoever. What harm could there be in using low art such as this, and placing it in the world of fine art? Well, the problem was that Lichtenstein used various panels from the above-mentioned issue, blew them up, re-drew and painted them onto his canvasses — and made a bundle of money out of it! Meanwhile, the lowly- paid comic book artists were aware of what Lichtenstein was doing with their work — mainly swiping their artwork and becoming quite wealthy from it. Some even let him know about it. Eventually Lichtenstein ended meeting up with some of them, and explained that he had never expected his idea to take off, and that he had just been a starving artist who got lucky. Apparently the comic book artists who met with him were charmed by the pop artist, and decided not to press the issue any further. However, Russ Heath, another of the artists who had had many of his panels “borrowed” by Lichtenstein, was less positive: “The Museum of Modern Art invited me and other artists to the opening when they displayed Lichtenstein’s work. However, I couldn’t make it due to deadlines… but I figured Lichtenstein owed me a drink at least.” As to the artistic merits of Lichtenstein’s work, it’s pretty evident that the low art comic books were better executed and drawn, but Lichtenstein’s images were more visually powerful. Maybe the comic book artists weren’t aware that if they blew up panels from their comics, they were creating art! On the other hand, we had comic book artists such as the Spaniard Maroto who did just the opposite: he integrated images from iconic paintings that he copied and rendered in pen and ink into his stories as a direct homage to the great painters and illustrators he admired — although fans felt he was swiping from famous artists. There’s a thin line between swiping and honouring, although in Lichtenstein’s case the latter wasn’t evident. You can check David Barsalou’s website Deconstructing Lichtenstein at http://davidbarsalou.homestead.com/ LICHTENSTEINPROJECT.html for more samples taken from other comic books. ● ABOVE: Panel from the story “The Star Jockey” drawn by Irv Novick for All-American Men of War No. 89 (1962). BELOW: Lichtenstein’s painting “Whaam!” (1963). © DC Comics