Here’s my entry for the Image Duplicator exhibition that opens next month in the Orbital Comics gallery in London. I posted about this last month, it’s been set up by Rian Hughes to highlight the original artists that Lichtenstein copied, uncredited, for his most famous Pop Art works. For mine I’ve chosen Tony Abruzzo‘s work that was used for two other ‘Kiss’ pieces. I wanted to give a nod to Dave Gibbons – the original artist on Watchmen – for his speaking out on the subject of appropriating imagery whilst also referencing the similar outcry when Watchmen was remodeled as Before Watchmen last year. Not quite the same thing I know but it makes for a tenuous link.

Creating a fake cover for a comic called Before Lichtenstein was the first part, I then made this into a ‘real’ distressed comic that looked like it might have been the sort of thing Lichtenstein copied from. I chose to do one of the Kiss images because of the visual link to Watchmen – the iconic silhouetted kissing imagery that crops up throughout. If I have time I’d love to do a ‘variant’ version with the same image in X-ray, aping the ‘nuclear kiss’ image.

The list of participants in the show so far is shaping up with Dave Gibbons, Shaky Kane, Rian Hughes, Steve Cook, Mark Blamire, Jason Atomic, Graham Ross, David Leach and, possibly even… Howard Chaykin (!) David Barsalou has pitched several pieces as well, his site being the Deconstructing Lichtenstein reference everyone has been using to compare and contrast images from. The show opens May 16th-31st at the Orbital Gallery (inside Orbital Comics, 8 Great Newport Street
London, WC2H 7JA).