Tom Lundin sends the following e-mail which felt like it oughta be posted here and answered…

I think condemning (however lightly) Roy Lichtenstein's use of preexisting source material for his artwork is somewhat disingenous and misses the point. Many fine comic artists themselves made use of published photographic material cribbed from magazines, newspapers or other sources and traced them with an Artograph projector, recomposing the images along the way to create a derived work. (Today, we'd call it "repurposing", but whatever you call it, it's a time-honored artistic technique. The Rules of Attraction website has an excellent history of photorealistic comics.)

As artists are wont to do, Lichtenstein took that technique one step further — pushing the artistic envelope a little and, perhaps, pushing the intellectual property boundaries a little more — by enlarging the essence of certain comic panels as standalone works of art.

That his derived works commanded thousands of times more money than the original art is less a comment on his art skills than a reflection of the relative value a culture places on various forms of art, entertainment, or sports. Art is what people say it is, and it's worth as much as they're willing to pay. In comic form, pages of art were worth 10 or 12 cents. In canvas form, one panel was worth a few thousand dollars.

Part of an artist's raison d'etre is often to try to make society look at something from a new perspective. You can't look at a picture of a Campbell's soup can label today without thinking of Warhol — well, I can't, anyway. So, too, Lichtenstein tried to redefine the comic panel in acrylic colors and larger-than-life size. Is it art? Is it new? Is it copying? Is it valuable? Is it wrong? The questions that the artist forces us to confront are often as much a part of the art as the object itself.

Well, the main thing I'd disagree with in the above is a personal aside — the use of the word "disingenuous," since I meant exactly what I said. Beyond that, we are into the shady world of to what degree a work of art can parallel another without being classed as plagiarism. The standards are murky and can only be adjudged on a case-by-case basis. I assume you agree that it is possible for someone to so totally copy the work of another that it does become an act of theft. All of the standards and questions of art can still apply, and the derivative work can still have its own value…but underscoring it all is that one artist has signed his name to work that was substantially created by another. I also think there's a substantive, obvious difference between basing a drawing on photographic reference, even when a tracing device is employed, and tracing another man's drawing. In the case of Lichtenstein and the comic artists from whom he borrowed, we're talking about exploiting an image that the other artist conceived from his own imagination. When Lichtenstein replicated a Russ Heath comic book panel, he was selling a visual that Heath conceived and transferred to paper, but doing so with neither credit nor payment to Heath.

That Lichtenstein's work has a standalone merit is not, I think, in dispute. Though I suspect his popularity was based more on transitory fad than on substance, people did buy his work and cram into galleries to view it. Apparently, they still do, so I wouldn't question that he did make people look at something from a new perspective. I just feel that he crossed the line between taking inspiration from an existing source and passing someone else's work off as his own.

A number of articles about the Abu Ghbraib prison scandal (like this one) have mentioned a famous and frightening incident in psychological research…the prison experiment helmed by Dr. Philip Zimbardo in 1971. You can learn all about it over at Dr. Zimbardo's website but for those who don't want to make the trek: Two teams of apparently ordinary college students were selected. A mock prison situation was set up with one team functioning as guards and the other filling the role of prisoners. Within a very short time, the "guards" became inexplicably brutal to the "prisoners" who felt so put upon that they began plotting rebellion. It all got so ugly that Dr. Zimbardo was forced to terminate the experiment prematurely.

In the early eighties, a TV show I was working on did a story on the experiment and I got to meet and interview Dr. Zimbardo and view all the existing film and photos. The doctor still seemed shaken by the whole story but he was also puzzled that it had had so little impact on the policies and perceptions of actual prisons. Psychologists, he said, had devoted thousands of hours to discussing what it had all meant but the reaction of those involved with real incarceration was along the lines of, "Yeah, so?" It did not seem to matter to most that prisons might make criminals even more anti-social and psychotic…or that even the guards came out less human than when they went in. Soon after, when this country experienced an uncommon level of prison riots, it still did not seem to matter.

There does seem to be a parallel between Dr. Zimbardo's faux guards turning savage and the reportedly-undertrained military guards abusing Iraqi prisoners but I doubt it will be explored. During a war, there's never time to pause and ask why people act the way they do. And when we're not at war, we don't like to think about it.

Just fixed the link on the previous posting. Sorry…and thanks to all who caught my error.

Here's the latest article by Seymour Hersh on the prison scandal. No matter what your view is of it all, Hersh is at the center of this story so you might as well see what he has to say.

To all who've volunteered to tape the show tomorrow for Sergio, my thanks. I have someone recording it.

Longtime artist and editor Gill Fox died this morning after several months of illness. Fox was born November 29, 1919 and started his professional career with a brief stint at the Max Fleischer cartoon studio. Labor unrest drove him away from that industry and into the then-new field of comic books where he drew for the earliest DC books and for the Harry "A" Chesler shop. In 1940, he became an editor and frequent cover artist for Quality Comics. His covers for Plastic Man are sometimes presumed to be the work of Jack Cole and his covers for Torchy (like the one at left) are often credited to that strip's main artist, Bill Ward. He eventually moved on from comic books to advertising cartooning with the Johnstone and Cushing Agency. One of his best friends there was an artist named Dik Browne and he eventually helped Browne when he began drawing the Hi and Lois newspaper strip.

Fox himself later segued into newspaper work and was intensely proud of his late work as a political cartoonist. His friend Jim Amash did the definitive interview with Fox and Alter Ego magazine and you can read part of it here. The man was a respected artist, extremely well-liked by his peers and pals, and a lot of cartoonists are in mourning today.

I'm watching On the Record With Bob Costas and they're doing a segment on the anniversary of the movie, Airplane. Co-director Jim Abrahams just mentioned that David Letterman screen-tested for the role of Ted Stryker, the hero ultimately played by Robert Hays. Does anyone think the movie would have worked with him in that role? I sure don't.

Speaking of Mr. Letterman: I enjoyed his show last night…the one taped at 4 AM. But he has to be really disappointed at the ratings this morning which were no higher than usual and maybe even lower. I also enjoyed an interview he did earlier in the week with John McCain. Dave is a better interviewer of political figures than many folks who do it full-time.

Robert Spina writes…

I couldn't help but notice you expressed no opinion of the "rightness" or "wrongness" of how Lichtenstein made his living. Or if "right" and "wrong" even apply here. It has always bothered me that Lichtenstein seemingly made his greatest fortune on the backs of some of the most talented, yet underpaid and under-represented artists in the field we hold so dear.

It bothers me, too. I should have made that clear. There was some degree of plagiarism in there in the sense of passing off someone else's work as your own. Lichtenstein did have the idea of enlarging comic book panels that way, and he worked out a way to replicate the dot patterns via (I believe) some sort of template. But otherwise what he was selling was the artistry of Mssrs. Romita, Heath, Colan, etc. He was hardly the only one to crib their work and his exploitation doesn't bother me as much as some of what their immediate employers did. But yeah, I thought it was wrong. I also thought that if you'd paid John Romita to do a comic book panel that size, you'd have gotten a much better painting for about a tenth the money.

Beginning in the late fifties, Roy Lichtenstein became famous for what some later called "pop art" paintings, many of which were enlarged comic book panels. Over at this site, a gent named David Barsalou displays some of the results of a long-term research project, which was to find the original source material for Lichtenstein's paintings. Most of them appear to me to be panels by John Romita, Russ Heath, Mike Sekowsky and Jerry Grandenetti. Needless to say, Mr. Lichtenstein made a lot more money off his versions than the real artists did from creating the originals.

As far as I know, there is no record of Roy Lichtenstein actually drawing comic books even though he was traipsing about New York from around 1951 to 1957 looking for commercial art jobs. Jack Kirby claimed that Lichtenstein applied for work at the Simon-Kirby studio during this period but that his samples weren't good enough. I'm not sure I believe that but it's at least possible.

This is really just for folks in or around San Francisco. My partner, master cartoonist Sergio Aragonés will be interviewed on the local TV series, Latin Eyes, this coming Sunday, May 16. The show airs on KRON, Channel 4, twice that day…at 10 AM and again at Midnight. It's all themed to Latin American viewers but the telecast is in English. If anyone up there is willing to record it for Sergio, please let me know.

Whatever you do, if you value your sanity, do not click on this link.

As you may know, comic strips are drawn well in advance of publication and the Sunday sections are drawn even farther ahead of the dailies. The Sunday sections are also usually printed well in advance. As a result, on Sunday, May 23, Doonesbury is in the unfortunate situation of having a strip that involves a severed head…done well before the Nick Berg incident. One suspects folks who don't know about lead times will be attacking Mr. Trudeau for exploiting the murder for his own purposes.

[UPDATE at 4:12 PM: Corrected the date of the Doonesbury strip in question. So sorry.]

I'm going to try to write one post about the Abu Ghraib/Nick Berg comparison, then put it all out of my mind for the rest of the day. I think whether you are for this war or against it, you have to put up with having things shoved in your face that seem to prove the incorrectness of your position. There are plenty for both sides, which is why the jury is still out, as far as I'm concerned, on whether it was a good idea to invade Iraq in the first place. The overriding answer for me — not that anyone's waiting breathlessly for me to decide — will have to do with the ultimate cost and what becomes of Iraq. Will it actually become a real democracy? Will life be better for Iraqis than if we'd left their nation alone? And what will the total price tag be for us in terms of lives ended or damaged, as well as dollars? I don't know how anyone can say we definitely should or should not have invaded without allowing that the final cost/gain ratio may contradict what they believed at the outset.

But whichever way you've made up your mind so far, there have been developments in the news that tell you it's wrong. The Abu Ghraib pix have cost us a large chunk of the moral ground on which we as a nation like to believe we always stand. The Berg video reminds us that there are people out there — and "people" is being charitable — who achieve orgasm at the thought of dead Americans. Both visuals exist and one does not cancel out the other.

If you believed in this war at the outset, you had some wonderful moments of triumph and vindication early on but lately, your faith has been battered. We were not "greeted with flowers," at least to the extent that some predicted, and the cost to us in lives and dollars is soaring well above what any pro-invasion voices predicted. There's also the little matter of Weapons of Mass Destruction that were absolutely, positively right where our intelligence forces claimed, ready to destroy America at any moment. You may not agree that invading Iraq was a mistake — or even that it was a noble cause that has been poorly handled — but it shouldn't surprise you that an increasing number of Americans think it wasn't worth it. Gallup says 54% feel that way against only 44% who feel it is worthwhile. (To me, the most surprising and suspicious aspect of this poll is that only 2% appear to be undecided.) At the same time, the Pew folks (same link) say 51% of Americans think the decision to use military force in Iraq was correct versus 42% who feel it was a mistake. Both polls could be correct and if so, they show that there are a lot of frustrated Americans out there.

What the Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg visuals do have in common is not just that they upset our worldviews and stomachs but that someone committed them to digital imagery. Prison tortures do occur and Americans are savagely murdered but in these particular cases, someone said, "Wait…let me get my camera!" The Berg murder was done for mass distribution on the Internet. It was intended to sicken. The Abu Ghraib photos (and apparently, forthcoming videos) were presumably not, though you have to wonder why they were taken at all. Did the person or persons holding the Nikon think, "Oh, Grandma back home will be so thrilled to get these"? I frankly don't understand why anyone, even if following orders, would apply electrodes to someone's genitals and I really, really don't understand why anyone would feel the moment needed to be recorded for posterity.

Whatever the purpose, we have those images and I'm not suggesting they're all equally bad. But they are equally here, to be joined soon by more disturbing imagery, I am sure. No matter how the politically-motivated folks try to spin such images to appeal to us as Democrats or Republicans, the first level on which we ought to process them is as human beings. And I'm sure going to try to not move beyond that…because anyone who clings to the notion that the war is 100% right or 100% wrong is going to have their precious percentage shattered by a lot more sickening imagery.

If anyone would like to know how far apart the Writers Guild is from a deal with the Producers, here's a chart that shows the current offers on the table.

A number of folks have called my attention to this posting over on one of my favorite Internet stops, Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo. It may remind you a lot of…well, of the previous post on my site here.

One reader of this site recommended I read James S. Robbins on "Comparative Barbarism." I don't know that we need someone to explain to us that beheading Nick Berg is a more savage act than humiliating prisoners but it doesn't hurt to make that point. Robbins is wrong though that "No one has sought to justify these actions [the prison tortures], not even those who committed them." Take Senator James Inhofe, for instance.

I don't think most of America will buy the argument that some seem to be making that the Nick Berg video somehow minimizes or erases the torture pix. The lesser of two evils is still evil. If there really is a strategic justification for the torture practices, I'd love to hear it. At the moment, it seems like both a moral failing and a foolish thing to do in a land where we wanted to be "greeted as liberators." The fact that there are maniacs out there capable of worse doesn't change that. (As Jon Stewart notes, we can't possibly "out-psychopath Al-Qaida.")

Thanks to all of you who wrote about this issue. Unfortunately, I am so swamped with e-mail that wishes to engage me in one-on-one political debate that I can't answer much (if any) of it. I'm not quite in Deadline Hell at the moment but it is getting a little warm…