By Jordan Young

At the arrival of the twentieth century, cultural dynamics between “low brow” and high culture began to shift. Movements such as Dada turned artistic conventions on its head, challenging academic hierarchies that influenced how artwork would be culturally valued based on thematic and aesthetic elements. Pop Art would follow in Dada’s footsteps, merging mass consumerism with traditional techniques/mediums favored by fine art institutions. Pop artists’ application of commercial art techniques, from silkscreen prints to billboard painting, onto traditional substrates/materials created a striking cultural dissonance. Out of the members of Pop, Roy Lichtenstein exemplified this phenomenon via his appropriated comic-styled paintings, Whaam! and Crak!. Using canvas painting and lithography, Lichenstein repurposed comic strips into fine art artifacts that would be exhibited and highly collectible within the art market. The comic strips, both from stories by DC Comics and featuring stylized militant violence, are transformed from mass-printed entertainment to an artist’s exploration on mixing the high with the low. The elevation of a “lowly” cultural form into a “highly” one alerts to how an image’s artistic context – whether in a comic book or gallery – influences it hierarchal placement within American visual culture. Through exploring Lichtenstein’s Whaam! and Crak!, the designation between fine and “kitsch” within artistic discourse and its necessity may be questioned – and challenged.

Lichtenstein’s comic paintings are emblematic of merging mass entertainment and fine art methods. Visually identical to mechanically printed graphic art, Lichtenstein’s portfolio reflected an emerging understanding that “conditions of mass media could be considered as a primary influence” (Chin, 6) among traditional fine artists. Popular culture and its “kitsch” imagery were appealing to common consumers’ aesthetic tastes, feared by high art enthusiasts as “insensible to the value of genuine culture” (Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch”). Kitsch art/objects include “chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp, comics” (Ibid) – visual culture that could emphasize instantly gratifying consumption over high cultural values. Comic books, fitting under such categories, were viewed as disposable and juvenile compared to traditional art. Despite this, comic art had been recognized and appreciated by general audiences and included in pre-Pop exhibitions, such as the American Institute of Graphic Arts’s The Comic Strip exhibition in 1942 (fig. 1).


Fig. 1 – Exhibition poster for AIGA’s The Comic Strip (1942), illustrated by Fred Cooper

AIGA’s exhibition, recognized as the “first-known attempts to put comics in a scholarly art historical context”, included comic strips alongside “museum-quality examples of earlier narrative art as ancestors” (Munson, 72). While comic books had support from artists and curators, it still retained a “lowly” status as conservative groups deemed the medium “as having a negative effect on children and literacy” (Ibid, 75). Comic books were already the subject for artistic and academic appreciation, but were still at the bottom compared to institutional art. Lichtenstein’s comic-styled artwork, though appropriated imagery, contributed to comic art’s larger recognition from the public and art market as highly valuable cultural forms. The artist’s “technique of isolating, scaling up, and exhibiting in gallery environments single panels” (Molotiu, 47) elevated the comic as an aesthetic object representative of culture rather than cheap entertainment. It is through Lichenstein’s process that assists in blurring the lines between “high” and “low” art, becoming interchangeable with one another.

Lichtenstein’s art within the Pop period achieves the same process as placing comic strips in art galleries – commercial imagery engaging with and elevated by institutional art conventions. This leads to one cultural form being dependent on the other, and in the Pop context the masses “may be pleased if their fare is borrowed from or by a culture of a higher status” (Gans, 39). Lichtenstein’s use of comic book imagery via his classical art training, strikingly mechanical without the artist’s hand present, transforms its aesthetic context away from its lowly entertainment confines. Lichtenstein’s art also reflects Pop Art’s cultural cycle, reflections of popular culture inherently turning into its product. With Pop artists a la Andy Warhol, where the artist becomes a pop symbol akin to their commercialized subject matter, Lichtenstein’s art gained such a status “in terms of the way in which it used these materials” (Crane, 67) from mass-printed comic strips. The artist’s stylization, reminiscent of illustrative mid-century advertisements/posters, displayed a consciousness in reflecting on imagery meant to sell rather than elicit a critical response. Lichtenstein’s traditional material treatment with a consumer-heavy medium like comics reveals a tension in “bringing together divergent strategies of authorship and identity from commercial culture and fine art practice”(Lobel, 41). Whaam! (fig. 2) scales up a panel from issue 89 of DC Comics’ All-American Men of War, originally illustrated by comic artist Irv Novick (fig. 3).


Fig. 2 – Whaam! (1963) by Roy Lichtenstein, diptych painting.



Fig.3 – Panel from DC Comics’ All-American Men of War, no. 89 (1962), illustrated by Irv Novick.

The comic was featured in an anthology of war-themed stories/characters, with the story “The Star Jockey!” as its original source. Lichtenstein’s painting copies its source, an American fighter plane unleashing a missile onto an enemy plane with the pilot’s dialogue confined to a saturated yellow speech bubble. The action culminates in a fiery explosion of red and yellow, punctuated with an onomatopoeic

‘WHAAM!’ against sky blue. Whaam!’s visuals are rendered like its mass-printed source, thick graphic lines enclosing objects and Ben-Day dot patterning. It is here through Lichtenstein’s process that the comic panel is transformed aesthetic-wise, where the audience could perceive it “literalized in the temporal transformation that occurs when original art comic is used as gallery comics” (Molotiu, 49). The “low” object now gains institutional recognition, as demonstrated in pre-Pop comic exhibitions, its aesthetic qualities given time to breath as opposed to being flipped to the next page. With the isolation of the panel from its original story, the subject matter also transforms – from a heroic display of American militant powers to aggressive violence/conquest. The integration of high and low art alongside a cultural reflection of American exceptionalism in mass media places Whaam! as a product and perpetuator of popular culture.

Fig. 4 – Crak! (1963) by Roy Lichtenstein, lithograph.

Crak! (fig. 4) follows the same route as Whaam!, based on a panel (fig. 5) from issue 102 of Star Spangled War Stories, illustrated by Jack Abel.


Fig. 5 – panel from Star Spangled War Stories, no. 102 (1962), illustrated by Jack Abel.

The panel is from “The Town That Wouldn’t Die!”, a story of French villagers fighting against Nazis, featuring a woman firing a rifle while declaring allegiance to France. A rifle foregrounds the action as an onomatopoeic ‘KRAK!’ and ‘CRAK!’ are shown against gunpowder smoke. In Lichtenstein’s lithograph, the beret-clad woman is isolated as if she were the sole shooter, the ‘Crak!’ amplifying the harsh gunshot. The action is accented through bold yellow and white areas of smoke encompassed by thick lines, along with dot patterning and action lettering akin to the original source. Lichtenstein again focuses on stylized militant violence, with the woman symbolizing fighting back against oppressive power structures. The woman in Crak! contradicts Lichtenstein’s typical treatment of femininity punctuated with frivolous consumerism and emotional anguish, with the latter demonstrated in works like Crying Girl (fig. 6).

Fig. 6 – Crying Girl (1963) by Roy Lichtenstein, lithograph.

Crak! therefore “provisionally bridges the gap between two opposing experiences of visual perception” (Lobel, 94) – analyzing how feminine archetypes are represented in the comic medium. Lichtenstein’s lithograph, adapted from a story of political turmoil, also expands the artist’s treatment of femininity within his work.

Placing a comic strip onto a canvas and placing it in a gallery could – and has – lead to discussion surrounding what visual aesthetics/mediums are deserving of a “high” status. Like Lichtenstein, Pop Art prompted a discourse surrounding the nature of art, criticized as shallow advertisements rather than humanist outlooks emphasized in movements a la Abstract Expressionism. Critics deemed popular culture and the “kitsch” imagery it birthed as inherently anti-academic, rooted in shifting societal standards/gratification rather than loyalty to specific high culture values. Pop Art’s topicality and mass culture commentary hinders its intellectual potential, dumbed down for easy consumption “using for raw materials the debased and academized simulacra of genuine culture” (Greenberg, “Avant Garde and Kitsch”). Comic books could only be valued as entertainment for the masses who “did not win the leisure and comfort necessary for the enjoyment of [..] traditional culture”(Ibid) rather than subjects for significant artistic scholarship. While works like Lichtenstein’s could be viewed as juvenile due to their illustrative mark-making and artistic source, it is those works that behave as a cultural reflection to the increasing affluence afforded to those who exist outside of elite spaces. Lichtenstein’s inclusion of comic book visuals therefore behaves as a statement piece in culture where the elite “no longer possesses the power to dominate all aspects of art” (Alloway, “The Arts and Mass Media”).

It is for this reason that Lichtenstein’s Whaam! and Crak remain significant when discussing comic art in fine art spaces. Though appropriated and isolated from their original context, both artworks allow for an appreciation of a by-hand replication of mass-printing technologies and aesthetic scholarship for comic art. The comic strip could exist “longer, much longer than the time it would take us to read it then flip the page” and Lichtenstein’s isolation of the panels draws “attention to the non-logocentric dimension of the piece” (Molotiu, 47). The transformations present in Lichtenstein’s comic art bridge a cultural gap, prompting more interest in comics’ visual language within high and popular culture. Though Lichtenstein was not the first and last artist to place a comic strip against a gallery wall, his acclaim opens a dialogue to how cultural and institutional placement influences how audiences perceive/value certain art. Whaam! and Crak! are symbolic of such a phenomenon in the art world and consumerism popular culture at large.

The cultural discourse of comic book art in museums – and popular culture’s recognition as an artistic scholarship source – presents an argument for the increasing urbanization of fine art. Popular culture, from films to music, have received recent analysis within academic spaces for their reflections of societal archetypes/themes. Comic books are no different, with increasing number of exhibitions both domestic and abroad continuing to expand the medium as a vessel for graphic narratives and sociopolitical reflection – a la Lichtenstein’s technique of utilizing commercialized imagery to provide commentary on American consumerism. Comics progressing from cultural danger to cultural artifact reflects a necessary expansion in the fine arts, which can be hindered via which “so many academic institutions are, to an important extent, self-perpetuating and resistant to change” (Williams, 39). Expanding the cultural canon in museums allows for deeper appreciation for artists like Lichtenstein and other Pop artists, ones who recognized “kitsch” as potential for aesthetic radicalization without confining themselves to institutional standards. Mass media and “art at all levels now come to us, seizes our attention for a few […] moments before being elbowed by something else” (Mallon, “Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow”). Lichtenstein’s comic art, a combination of traditional methods and mass-produced aesthetics, creates “new lines with the past, breaking or redrawing existing lines” and culminates in “a radical kind of contemporary change” (Williams, 39).

Lichtenstein’s Whaam! and Crak! are significant examples of fine art merging with mass art. The artist’s treatment of stylized commercial imagery via traditional mediums opens the avenue for questioning hierarchies within visual culture, whether the space art is placed in or printed should determine its cultural value. The paintings provide a glimpse into the artist’s multi-faceted process, one that merges meticulous mark-making with aesthetic qualities of mass-printed media. Lichtenstein’s and the original comic’s depiction of sociopolitical imagery also establishes the comic medium as a source for meaningful cultural discussions within mass media. With original comic book art becoming increasingly valuable within fan and art collector spaces, Whaam! and Crak! are both interesting artifacts of high culture embracing – albeit with contention – mass arts within its aesthetic and academic circle.

Jordan Young is an undergraduate Drawing and Painting student and an active member of the UNT Comic Book Club. When not making her own art and comics, Jordan likes to read and write about kitsch art and pop culture and how they shape the visual culture that surrounds us.

Bibliography
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Grand Comics Database. “Issue: Star Spangled War Stories #102.” Accessed April 24 2025.
https://www.comics.org/issue/16867/#132113

Greenberg, Clement. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” The Partisan Review 6, no. 5, 1939; 34-49.

Lobel, Michael. Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art, Yale University Press, 2002.

Mallon, Thomas and Pankaj Mishra. “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow – Do These Kinds of Cultural Categories Mean Anything Anymore?” New York Times, July 29 2014.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/books/review/highbrow-lowbrow-middlebrow-do-these-kinds-of-cultural-categories-mean-anything-anymore.html

Molotiu, Andrei. “Comic Book and Comic Strip Art as Aesthetic Object.” In Comic Art in Museums, edited by Kim A. Munson. University Press of Mississippi, 2020.

Williams, Raymond. “The Analysis of Culture.” In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, edited by John Storey. University of Sunderland Press, 1994.