The Image Duplicator show opens for 2 weeks this Thursday at the Orbital Gallery inside Orbital Comics on Neal St, London. It sets various comic artists and graphic designers the task of re-appropriating, and in the process highlighting, the original artists that Roy Lichtenstein copied without credit for his most famous works.

Lining up to take part, and in some cases take the piss, are Dave Gibbons, Shaky Kane, Steve Cook, Howard Chaykin, Mark Blamire, Graeme Ross, myself, Jason Atomic and Rian Hughes – the latter two of which have put this whole event together

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There are many more too, and a catalogue has been put together along with high quality prints with all proceeds going to The Hero Initiative, a charity that aids ageing comic illustrators who are struggling to make a living. The prints are available online for those who can’t make it and some will be sold at the opening on Thursday night at the gallery. Hopefully a late addition to the show will be this cover of the current issue of Viz by Simon Thorp and interior cartoon by Lew Stringer and Graham Dury about a young Lichtenstein at school with Warhol.

When I first saw Lichtenstein’s work, probably as a teen in the 80’s, I liked it a lot. What was not to like as I had read comics since by youth and was familiar with the ‘graphic language’ that he took from? ‘Cool’, I thought, ‘an artist bringing comics into the fine art realm‘. ‘Whaam!’ was fun, friends had posters in their rooms, when I first met my wife she had a postcard on her wall of ‘M…Maybe’ (‘…he became ill and couldn’t leave the studio’ – oh the irony of that later on). I wasn’t particularly taken with his style, it just seemed adequate, all I really saw were generic comic panels of a certain era, large on a wall or in an art book. You could always tell it was Lichtenstein because no one else did that in the art world, why would they? It was a great idea but anyone else would have been accused of copying Roy Lichtenstein (ironic indeed).

I, like most people I imagined, assumed that he had looked at various War and Romance comics of the 60’s – when a house style was encouraged and artists were told to draw in a certain way – and then done his own versions of the kind of images he saw. I never read these kinds of comics as a kid but saw them on spinners in the local newsagent, or at least the 70’s equivalents. I never saw the Mickey and Daffy Duck paintings and there were no references to Batman, Superman, Spiderman etc. so I figured he had his style and was doing the retro thing with it. It never occurred to me that he had literally copied panels from the issues of the day, that would be plagiarism wouldn’t it? Surely someone would sue him?

It wasn’t until I was pointed to David Barsalou‘s Deconstructing Lichtenstein site that the penny dropped – these were copies, direct lifts, but simplified to erase any traces of style the original artists had injected that could make them easily detectable. Despite this ‘blandardisation’ it’s still easy to tell what comes from where and in each case, almost without exception, the original was better than the copy. And it went on and on and on, I never knew he’d done so much work but his one idea rolled on for decades with diminishing returns. A lot of critics will bring up the amount of money Lichtenstein makes from the sale of his works, and, although it’s an unfair turn of events when the original he copied goes for a 1000th of the price of his copy, it’s not the thing that gets my goat. People will pay all sorts of prices based on the perceived resale value and no one paid more for a piece of work because it was ‘better’ than another – beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. It’s the high art vs low art attitude of the galleries, critics and historians that have taken it upon themselves to designate one thing as trash and another as Art.

I first became aware of this distinction in the college art class when we were asked to bring in a copy of our favourite painting and talk about it. Up until this point I had had no art history tutoring and could barely tell my Picasso from my Cezanne. I had no ‘Art’ books at home but I decided to look through the books that I did have and see if any of it took my fancy. Even then I was aware that comics weren’t considered Art so I looked through an illustrator book of Horror stories and found a painting of a gent holding a candelabre in the dark, illuminating mainly just his face. It was OK but nothing special, some nice light and shadow effects and I had nothing else so it got taken in. When it came to show my selection my tutor said, ‘but that’s not Art, that’s just illustration’, and that’s when I realised the divide existed.