Pop art did not start in a pristine Manhattan gallery. It started in an army bunk during World War II, when an officer took pity on a crying young soldier who hated cleaning latrines.
The officer was Irv Novick, a professional comic book illustrator who had been drafted into the United States Army. The soldier weeping on the bunk was Roy Lichtenstein. Decades after that quiet encounter in uniform, Lichtenstein would take one of Novick's comic book drawings, paint it onto a monumental canvas, and watch it become Whaam!, one of the most famous and expensive paintings of the 20th century.
An Army Encounter in the Rain
In the early 1940s, Irv Novick was already an established illustrator for MLJ Comics, drawing characters like The Shield before answering his draft notice. Lichtenstein was younger, less experienced, and deeply miserable in his basic training assignment.
Novick later recalled walking into the chief of staff's quarters one evening and finding Lichtenstein sitting on his bed, visibly upset. Lichtenstein explained that he was an artist, but the military had assigned him to menial maintenance work: sweeping floors, scrubbing mess halls, and cleaning latrines. When Lichtenstein pulled out his portfolio to show what he could do, Novick was not immediately impressed. In an interview published years later, Novick described the early sketches as "rather poor and academic."
Even so, Novick saw a fellow artist in distress. Using his standing as an officer, Novick pulled a few strings and arranged for Lichtenstein to be transferred out of fatigue duty and into the base headquarters. There, Lichtenstein was given a desk, pens, and paper, spending the rest of his wartime service drafting signs, posters, and tactical maps. It was Lichtenstein's first professional assignment behind a drafting table.
The 1962 Comic Book Panel That Changed Everything
After the war, both men returned to civilian life, but their careers headed in wildly different directions. Novick joined DC Comics, becoming one of the premier pencilers for titles like Batman, The Flash, and All-American Men of War. He drew hundreds of comic book pages every year on tight deadlines, defining early pop culture art paid by the page, with no royalties or gallery recognition.
Lichtenstein struggled through the 1950s as an abstract expressionist painter and art teacher before discovering his signature breakthrough: taking small, commercial comic book panels and re-creating them on canvas using primary colors and painted Ben-Day dots.
In February 1962, DC Comics published issue #89 of All-American Men of War. Inside was a story titled "The Star Jockey!", illustrated by Irv Novick. On one page, Novick drew a dramatic three-by-four-inch panel showing an American F-86 Sabre jet firing a missile into an enemy aircraft, complete with a bright explosion burst and yellow sound-effect lettering reading "WHAAM!".
Lichtenstein saw the issue, picked up a pencil, and went to work.
From a 3-Inch Box to a 13-Foot Diptych
Lichtenstein did not simply photo-copy Novick's drawing. He transformed the tiny box into a massive two-panel diptych spanning 13 feet across (172.7 × 406.4 cm). He painted the composition as a monumental piece of canvas art, applying hand-painted red and yellow dots through a perforated metal screen to mimic the cheap mechanical halftone printing of comic books.
He also tightened the composition. He altered the plane's angle, brightened the red explosion bursts, and adjusted the text box in the upper corner ("I PRESSED THE FIRE CONTROL... AND AHEAD OF ME ROCKETS BLAZED THROUGH THE SKY...").
When Lichtenstein exhibited Whaam! at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1963, it caused an instant sensation. Critics marveled at how Pop art took low-culture commercial trash and reframed it as monumental contemporary art. In 1966, London's Tate Gallery purchased Whaam! for £3,940 (roughly $9,000 at the time). Today, Lichtenstein's major canvases fetch upwards of $150 million at auction, and Whaam! remains one of the central attractions of the Tate Modern.
The Uncredited Original
For decades, visitors at the Tate admired Whaam! without ever knowing the name of the man who drew the original composition. Novick received no royalties, no share of the sale, and no mention on the museum wall plaque.
Years after the painting became famous, Novick happened to see a reproduction of Whaam! in an art magazine. He recognized his own line-work immediately. He remembered the exact Korean War comic panel he had drawn at his drawing board in 1961, and he recognized the painter's name.
It was the same young soldier he had rescued from cleaning latrines at camp twenty years earlier.
The revelation sparked lasting friction between the commercial illustration community and the fine art world. Cartoonists like Bill Griffith openly criticized Pop Art appropriation, calling it uncredited copying. Art historian David Barsalou later documented over 300 comic book panels that Lichtenstein copied from commercial illustrators who were never compensated or credited.
Lichtenstein defended his work by arguing that he was not copying a drawing, but rather analyzing the visual language of American mass media. To Lichtenstein, comic panels were impersonal, industrial symbols to be deconstructed. The quiet irony, of course, was that the panel was not impersonal at all. It was the personal work of Irv Novick, the officer who had handed Lichtenstein a pencil when he needed one most.
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