Roy Lichtenstein, the Whitney, and the joke inside the hero
In 1963 a former Army draftsman painted one jet destroying another, and took the picture from a panel in a twelve-cent war comic, drawn by a man who later said he had been the draftsman’s officer. This season the Whitney hangs more than 130 of his works under the title Like New, and The New Yorker’s review says the best of them aim their camp wit at masculinity. The heroes, in other words, are in quotation marks. What about the men who drew them?
Issue 89 of All-American Men of War, cover-dated February 1962 and priced at twelve cents, has somewhere in its middle a panel in which a jet fires a rocket at another jet, drawn by Irving Novick. Thirty-six years later, when Roy Lichtenstein had been dead a year and that panel had become the most famous explosion in American painting, Novick told a story about him: that he, a comics man from the Bronx trained at the National Academy of Design, had been the superior officer who heard a tearful draftee named Lichtenstein complain about his menial work and got him a better job. The retellings have since handed the draftee a mop. The story has problems. Novick placed it in 1947, by which time Lichtenstein had been out of the Army for a year and Novick was drawing a newspaper strip called Cynthia. It rests on Novick’s word alone, and the comics scholar Bart Beaty reads it as an old man’s attempt to make a famous one smaller. It is still the right story to carry up to the Whitney’s fifth floor this winter, because it holds in miniature everything the show is about: a man copying a man, a hero drawn by hand and then drawn again, and the question of who, exactly, is being laughed at.
Roy Lichtenstein: Like New opened on October 11 and runs to May 10, 2027. It is the first major retrospective of his work in New York since the Guggenheim’s in 1993, and it was organized by the Whitney’s Meg Onli with the artist Alex Da Corte, whose studio has re-created the mural Lichtenstein made for the 1964 World’s Fair and who has painted anew his 1967 Super Sunset Billboard. Hilton Als, reviewing it in The New Yorker, writes that the show positions Lichtenstein as “the last happy white man in American art,” and allows that so much charm can tire a viewer as well as please one. The review’s headline and subtitle put its claim in a line worth an afternoon’s thought: that Lichtenstein’s best work aims its camp humor at gender stereotypes, and the headline names the target, masculinity.
The claim has a history of its own. Als was project editor of the catalogue for Black Male, Thelma Golden’s 1994 exhibition at the Whitney on the representation of masculinity, and he has spent most of the years since as a theater critic, where camp is a working tool rather than an insult. It reaches us under the byline of a critic who knows what a hero looks like in makeup. So take the claim seriously and walk it through the pictures: the pilot in the cockpit, the painter named Brad, the villain with the furious eyes, the hand that holds the brush, the caller on the other end of the line. If Lichtenstein put the American man in quotation marks, the question a curious reader wants answered is not whether the joke is funny. It is where the joke lands, given that the hero was drawn first, at a page rate, by men named Irv Novick and Russ Heath.
I The Lieutenant’s Panel
Inside that issue a story called “Star Jockey” had a panel by Novick in which a jet fires a rocket and another jet comes apart in flame, and the following year Lichtenstein made it into Whaam!, two canvases together more than thirteen feet wide, on the scale of the abstract expressionists’ canvases. He showed it at Leo Castelli’s gallery in 1963. The Tate bought it in 1966, and in Britain it has been the picture people think of when they hear his name ever since. He kept the jets, the rocket and the burst. He dropped the story. On the comics, he is quoted as saying that “the heroes depicted in comic books are fascist types, but I don’t take them seriously,” as allowing that there might be a political point in not taking them seriously, and then as saying he used them for purely formal reasons.
DC’s war comics fed him more than once, and the second artist is the one to watch. Panels by Russ Heath became Blam in 1962 and parts of Okay Hot-Shot, Okay! and Brattata in 1963. Heath lived to ninety-one. In his eighties he drew a six-panel strip about the business for the Hero Initiative, the charity that had helped pay for his knee surgery, and his line on the matter was plain. He believed part of the Whaam! panel was his, and the Tate’s own magazine has credited it to Novick and Heath together; of that painting he said Lichtenstein got four million dollars, and of himself, “I got zero.” The Tate agreed to pay a dealer £3,940 for the painting in 1966 and has kept it ever since, so whatever Heath meant by four million, nobody paid Lichtenstein that for it. Like Novick’s date, Heath’s figure is off, and off in the direction of the grievance. He said Lichtenstein at least owed him a drink. The men who drew the heroes, it turns out, had a sense of humor too, and it ran in the other direction.
Lichtenstein’s own war is worth setting beside the one they drew. He was drafted in 1943, at nineteen, out of Ohio State, and the Army put him through a sequence of studies and training programs it then cancelled, pilot training among them. He never flew. He served as an orderly and a draftsman, came home in early 1946 to a dying father, and went back to Ohio on the G.I. Bill to finish a degree his parents had wanted him to have in case he ever had to teach. Which he did, on and off for most of the next eighteen years, at Ohio State, in Oswego and at Rutgers, until he could stop. The pilot in Whaam!, then, is the man he was once put in training to become, drawn by men who drew such pilots for a living.
Look at how he painted that man. The pilot in Whaam! is a helmet in a canopy, no face to speak of; in Okay Hot-Shot the face is there but the mouth is a slot pouring out a sentence; in As I Opened Fire the voice narrates its own heroism in the past tense while the guns are still firing. Lichtenstein’s men are not characters. They are an announcer’s voice attached to a machine, and the machine does the acting. If there is a critique of masculinity in the war pictures, that is its form: the hero does not have a body, he has equipment, and he tells you what he did while he is doing it. Read this way, the joke is not cruel. It is the joke of an Army draftsman who never got off the ground.
II Brad, Darling
The year before Whaam! he painted a man from behind. In Masterpiece, from 1962, a blonde and a painter we see only as a dark head and a shoulder stand before a canvas, and her balloon tells him that the picture is a masterpiece and that all of New York will soon be clamoring for his work. His name, the balloon says, is Brad. Lichtenstein was thirty-eight that year and still teaching at Rutgers. His first Castelli show, that February, had sold out before it opened, and the painting is a joke about the artist as hero told by a man who had been one for about five minutes. It is also, as everyone now notes with a straight face, a picture that reportedly changed hands in 2017 for a hundred and sixty-five million dollars. Brad got his clamor. He still has his back to us.
The public clamor, when it came, was mostly hostile. A critic at The New York Times called him one of the worst artists in America, and on January 31, 1964, Life put the verdict into a headline as a question: “Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?” Lichtenstein’s own position, as it is usually reported, was that the nearer a picture stayed to its source, the more of a threat and a criticism it carried, which is either a serious theory of appropriation or the best deadpan in the history of the form.
And then there is the painting the show puts near its start. Image Duplicator, 1963, is a pair of furious eyes under a furrowed brow, lifted from the first issue of The X-Men, cover-dated September 1963, where they belonged to the villain Magneto as drawn by Jack Kirby and Paul Reinman; the Lichtenstein catalogue lists a second comic among the painting’s sources. The balloon above the eyes reads: “What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?” It has long been read as a self-portrait, and Da Corte, in the audio guide, reads it that way too, a man in a panic about the machine that makes his pictures. Lichtenstein told the critic John Coplans that he wanted a painting to look as if it had been programmed. The programmer, in the picture read as his self-portrait, is a cartoon villain cornered on exactly that point.
Set the three men side by side and a pattern appears. The hero, Brad, has no face. The pilot has a helmet. The artist, in the picture read as his self-portrait, is a pair of eyes with no mouth, speaking in a balloon. Few critics at the time seem to have asked what he was doing with the men, because few were looking at them. They were the furniture the women cried in front of. That is the review’s headline made concrete, and it is worth noticing: the men were always the joke, and the joke was always on the costume.
III The Hand and the Brush
In August 1949 Life had asked, in an article on Jackson Pollock, whether he was the greatest living painter in the United States. In January 1964 the same magazine asked whether Lichtenstein was the worst. The two questions are a matched pair, and the pairing is an old one. Less often noticed is that Lichtenstein answered the first question himself. In 1965 he began painting brushstrokes: single, enormous, cartooned swipes of yellow or red, outlined in black, dripping cartoon drips, laid over a field of Benday dots. He showed them at Castelli’s that November. The Whitney owns one of the best of them, Little Big Painting, and it is in the show.
What it is doing is making a cartoon of the most heroic gesture in American art. Harold Rosenberg had written in 1952 that for the new painters the canvas was “an arena in which to act,” and the sentence had become a creed: the stroke was the man, the man was the act, and the act was proof of something that the photographs of Pollock, crouched over the canvas like a man over an engine, were taken to confirm. Pollock had been dead nine years by 1965. De Kooning was alive and painting. Into that room Lichtenstein carried a brushstroke with no brushstrokes in it, the drips outlined and filled in, the dots behind them pushed through a perforated screen. It is a man’s mark with the man taken out.
The source makes it better. The first Brushstrokes came from a panel in a Charlton horror comic, Strange Suspense Stories number 72, dated October 1964, a story called “The Painting” about an artist named Jake whose canvas seems to take on a life of its own. The panel shows a hand gripping a paintbrush, and Lichtenstein said he liked the cartoonist’s shorthand for the hand and the paint. So the emblem of the action painter’s authentic self was lifted from a twelve-cent story about a painter and a picture with a will of its own, drawn to order by an artist usually identified as Dick Giordano. Years later Lichtenstein told interviewers the real source was Frans Hals. That sounds like a joke too, and a good one, because by then the brushstrokes were in museums and nobody was going to check.
He never let the gesture go. Through the eighties and nineties the brushstroke became sculpture, made in metal and painted, standing in plazas and lobbies, and the show has one of these, Coups de pinceau, from 1988, fabricated in 2011, after his death. The arc is the essay’s argument in a single motif. The manly act becomes a cartoon, the cartoon becomes a logo, the logo becomes a monument, and at every stage the hand that made it is nowhere to be seen. If you want to know what the brushstrokes make of the American painter as hero, you do not need Als or a wall text. You need to stand in front of a brushstroke in painted metal and ask who, exactly, is supposed to have made the stroke.
IV In Quotation Marks
The review’s word is campy, and 1964, the year of the Life headline and of the redhead on the telephone, is also the year Susan Sontag gave camp its definition. “Notes on ‘Camp’” ran in Partisan Review that fall: fifty-eight numbered notes, dedicated to Oscar Wilde, on a sensibility that loves artifice, exaggeration and the thing that is slightly off. Her tenth note, on quotation marks, is the one that matters here: “not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’” Among her examples of the sensibility she listed the old Flash Gordon comics. She had Pop art in front of her that season, and in her fifty-sixth note she set it beside camp and found it related but different: cooler and more aloof. The quotation marks, though, were already on the wall at Castelli’s. That is what the Benday dots are. They are the printer’s device that tells you a picture of a woman is a picture of a “woman,” and the dots cover the men as well.
Als has come back to the museum of Black Male thirty-two years later to review a painter who put the hero in quotation marks. Whether Lichtenstein meant it as critique is a separate question. The performance is on the wall. What it performs is the question.
So look at the redhead. Ohhh…Alright…, 1964, about three feet square, taken from a panel in the DC romance comic Secret Hearts: a woman with red hair and blue eyes holds a telephone to her ear and says, in a balloon, the two words of the title. Whoever she is talking to is not in the picture. In Drowning Girl, from the year before, the woman going under the wave would rather sink than call Brad. In Masterpiece Brad has his back to us. In a canvas of 1963 a tearful blonde tells Brad she knows how he must feel. Brad is faceless or unseen in all three. “‘Brad’ sounded like a hero to me,” Lichtenstein once said, and so every hero was to be called Brad; the idea, he added, had to do with cliché. The whole series of crying, drowning, telephoning women is a series of portraits of the hero’s absence. What most viewers saw was women in distress. The women are in distress about a man made of four letters and a telephone line.
There is a coda to the redhead that no novelist would dare. On November 10, 2010, at Christie’s in New York, Ohhh…Alright… was sold for $42,642,500, then the most ever paid for a Lichtenstein at auction, to an anonymous bidder who was not in the room. The bidder was on the telephone. A picture of a woman saying all right to a caller she cannot see went to a bidder nobody could see. If camp is the love of the thing that is slightly off, the sale was the campiest event in the painting’s life, and it took place forty-six years after the brush was put down.
V Like New
The title comes from a painting of 1962 in two panels: a screen with a hole in it and, beside it, the repair, after an advertisement for screen repair. The mend is a field of Benday dots. The curators’ stated aim was to slow the viewer down: Da Corte has said he wanted people to look at Lichtenstein more slowly, and Onli that recognizing a picture is not the same as understanding it. So the show reunites the paintings of his first Castelli show, of February 1962, and in its galleries on duplication it hangs copies made of his pictures by Elaine Sturtevant and Richard Pettibone beside his originals. Lichtenstein is said to have supplied stencils for Sturtevant’s copy and to have signed a Pettibone. Across the street, on a building facade, a vinyl print of his Hot Dog of 1963 carries Da Corte’s ketchup. A show about a man who hid the hand that made the pictures is full of other hands. Set side by side, the absences make a single figure: the hero has no face, the painter hid his hand, and the men who drew the hero seldom saw their names in print.
Now give the other side its full weight, because it is strong. The first objection is Heath’s, and no answer has quieted it: the hero was drawn by a working man at a page rate, and the critique of the hero was sold by a man who did not pay him. David Barsalou’s “Deconstructing Lichtenstein” project has spent years matching canvas after canvas to its panel and its artist. The second objection is Lichtenstein’s own. He called the heroes fascists in one breath and formal devices in the next, and said the name Brad had to do with cliché. He named the critique and declined to stand on it, and a reading of the men as costume is laid over a man who did exactly that. Als’s review has a note of its own, about the happy white man of its first paragraph, and the essay leaves it where he put it.
The concession that hurts is this. If the men in the pictures are the costume, the men who drew the costume were real. Lichtenstein was put in pilot training for the war and never flew; Novick and Heath drew that war for a living, and Kirby drew the hero, for children, on deadline. A joke on the posture of the American man was also, whatever the painter intended, a joke that ran straight across their drawing boards, and Heath’s charge sits beside it unanswered: that the painter grew rich on pictures the comics men had been paid for by the page. The essay cannot get around that. Da Corte’s hand is in the room, and the viewer can decide whether a re-created billboard is a tribute, a reparation or another duplication.
What remains is the man himself, the one figure the show cannot put in quotation marks: the draftee who never flew, the teacher who was thirty-eight when his first Castelli show opened, the husband whose marriage came apart while he painted women on telephones, and then, for thirty years, a famous artist who could name the politics of his pictures and take them back in the same breath. In his Pop years he painted the villain’s eyes long read as his self-portrait, and in 1978 a shirt with a mirror where the head should be. The review is right that the wit is the best of him. The curious reader leaves the fifth floor with a question the wit keeps turning aside, and it is not about Brad.
If the man in the picture was a costume, who was wearing it?
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Sources: Hilton Als, “Roy Lichtenstein’s Witty Critiques of Masculinity,” The New Yorker, November 9, 2026, online November 2. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s pages for Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, including its gallery texts on the Castelli Gallery, The Duplication Machine and the New York World’s Fair Mural, its audio guide, and its page for Alex Da Corte’s Hot Dog with Ketchup; Meg Onli and Alex Da Corte in conversation with Hypebeast, October 2026; Introspective on the Super Sunset Billboard; Sotheby’s, New York, 2018, on Like New. On the comics: Tate Etc., Spring 2013, on Whaam!, and The Art Newspaper, February 2013, on its purchase; Russ Heath as quoted by Smithsonian, and the New York Times obituary of Heath, August 2018, as reprinted by WRAL; Bart Beaty, Comics Versus Art (2012), and CBR on Irv Novick’s 1998 account, and Lambiek Comiclopedia on Novick’s Cynthia; David Barsalou’s “Deconstructing Lichtenstein”; Diane Waldman, Roy Lichtenstein (Guggenheim Museum, 1993), and the Art Institute of Chicago on the Brushstrokes source; and Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue Raisonné, on Image Duplicator and I Know How You Must Feel, Brad…. Lichtenstein on the comic-book heroes as quoted in James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger, eds., Modernity and Mass Culture (1991), p. 208. Life, January 31, 1964, as given by the Castelli Gallery; Christie’s on Ohhh…Alright…, sold November 10, 2010; Bloomberg on the 2017 sale of Masterpiece. The Whitney library’s record for Thelma Golden’s Black Male catalogue (1994). John Coplans, ed., Roy Lichtenstein (1972); Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” ARTnews, December 1952; Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Partisan Review, Fall 1964, collected in Against Interpretation (1966). Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5; literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; cold read by Claude Fable 5.1. Images generated with Gemini Argon.