Who Drew the Comics Lichtenstein Painted?

Who drew the woman going under in Drowning Girl? The name on the museum label is Roy Lichtenstein's, and the Museum of Modern Art, which has owned the painting since 1971, can say so truthfully: he painted it. But he painted a picture someone else had drawn. Wikipedia's entry on the painting traces it to the splash page of "Run for Love!" in DC's Secret Hearts #83 (November 1962), illustrated by Tony Abruzzo — a page Lichtenstein cropped hard, reworded and enlarged to about 1.7 metres square.

That is one of the better-settled answers. Ask the same question of Whaam! and the record gives three names. Ask it of Anxious Girl, which sold for $46 million in May, and it gives two names that disagree. Ask it of Nurse, which made $95.4 million in 2015, and the argument is over which comic it came from at all. With the Whitney's Roy Lichtenstein: Like New on view until 10 May 2027, the question is a live one: how many of the artists behind Lichtenstein's comic paintings can be named, who named them, and how firm is each name?

The claim

The charge against Lichtenstein is specific. Critics say he took panels from commercial comics and enlarged them into paintings that sold for ever larger sums, and that he "did not credit, pay any royalties to, or seek permission from the original artists or copyright holders" — the words in which Wikipedia's entry on him summarises the complaint, citing Creative Review and ComicsAlliance. His defenders answer that the paintings are not copies.

The two halves of the charge are not equally easy to test. That he borrowed specific images is largely documented, as the sections below show. That nobody was credited, asked or paid rests on silence — on the absence of any record that anyone was — and silence is harder to prove than a drawing.

It is harder still because of how the source pages were made. A romance or war comic of 1962 passed through several hands: a writer, sometimes the editor himself; a penciller; an inker; a letterer. The credits for those hands survive unevenly. Wikipedia's entry on Abruzzo says the Drowning Girl page was lettered by Ira Schnapp; the Grand Comics Database splits the Anxious Girl page between a penciller and an inker. Ernesto Priego has pointed out, as Wikipedia's entry on Whaam! reports it, that the artists were not credited in the original comics either, which implicates the publisher, National Periodicals — the company that became DC. So the credits that exist today are reconstructions: a cartoonist's letter to a magazine, a researcher's identification of a hand, a volunteer-built database.

How the trail was followed

Three kinds of evidence carry the case.

A letters column. In Time of 17 May 1963, the newspaper cartoonist William Overgard wrote in to say that a Lichtenstein painting shown at the Guggenheim "comes pretty close to the last panel of my Steve Roper Sunday page" — the one dated 6 August 1961 — and to add: "Very flattering… I think?" Michigan State University's index of Time lists the letter on page 17, under the heading "Pop Art"; the quotations are as CBR reproduces them. It was good-humoured, and early: Lichtenstein's first solo show at Leo Castelli's gallery had closed little more than a year before.

A life's work. David Barsalou, a former art teacher from Chicopee, Massachusetts, noticed comic-book influences on Lichtenstein, Warhol and Mel Ramos as an art student in Hartford in the late 1970s, wrote them up in a class paper in 1979 and first exhibited the research in 2000, The Reminder reported in 2023. By 2011, after 32 years' work, his Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein had put more than 1,200 images on Flickr, pairing published comic panels with Lichtenstein's original drawings and adding essays and biographies of the original artists, ComicsAlliance reported. His aim was credit. "There's got to be some way to right this wrong," he told it. He also described friction: a letter from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, he said, claimed the images were copyrighted, and Artnet reported in 2023 that the estate had sent cease-and-desist letters over the project. The same Artnet report says the side-by-side comparisons in the 2023 documentary WHAAM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation were supplied by Barsalou.

A database. The Grand Comics Database, a volunteer-built catalogue of comics and their credits, attaches names to individual stories. It is also where the most recent dispute begins, as the section on Anxious Girl shows.

The artists' own testimony is the thinnest strand. Overgard wrote in 1963, as above; Russ Heath, much later, drew a strip; and Heath and a fellow artist, Hy Eisman, appear in the 2023 documentary, which Artnet says finds them looking back on the borrowing with resentment. For the others named below — Novick, Abruzzo, Grandenetti — no comment turned up in the sources checked for this piece.

What the record shows

Even the settled rows are incomplete. They name the artist, and sometimes the letterer, but rarely the writer; the words on the canvas had authors too.

Whaam! and Blam: one issue, at least three hands

The best-documented of Lichtenstein's sources is a single issue: DC's All-American Men of War no. 89, cover-dated February 1962. Wikipedia's entry on Whaam! says it fed at least four paintings — Whaam! (1963), Blam (1962), Okay Hot-Shot, Okay! and Brattata.

Whaam! is a composite. The panel that supplied its composition is by Irv Novick, from the story "Star Jockey," a dream sequence in which a Second World War P-51 pilot, Johnny Flying Cloud — "the Navajo ace" — imagines himself flying a jet and shooting down others. An article in Tate's own magazine, Tate Etc., says the compositional template came from a panel in All-American Men of War #89 (February 1962) "created by Russ Heath and Irv Novick," and Wikipedia's account reconciles the two names: the target plane is from a Heath drawing in the issue's "Aces Wild," and the attacker, according to the comics historian Paul Gravett, came from Jerry Grandenetti's "Wingmate of Doom" in issue 90 (April 1962). The text is believed to be the editor Robert Kanigher's. A painting catalogued under one name thus contains the drawing of three men and, probably, the words of a fourth.

The Tate bought Whaam! in 1966 from Ileana Sonnabend for £3,940 — the asking price had been £4,665 — over the objections of trustees including Barbara Hepworth, Andrew Forge and Herbert Read, Wikipedia reports.

Blam is simpler. Wikipedia's entry and Artnet's account of the 2023 documentary both put Russ Heath's art behind it. The painting, 172.7 by 203.2 centimetres, hangs at the Yale University Art Gallery, and it was in Lichtenstein's first solo show at Castelli in February–March 1962 — the same winter as the issue's cover date.

Heath's is the best-known name in the dispute. His grievance is usually pinned to Whaam!, and with reason — Tate names him — but his drawing sits behind Blam too, which gets far less attention. He was born in New York on 29 September 1926, drew for Timely, EC and DC, and with Kanigher created The Haunted Tank and Sea Devils; he died on 23 August 2018, aged 91. In his eighties, Wikipedia's entry on him says, the Hero Initiative, a charity for comics professionals in need, and the Comic Art Professional Society of Los Angeles raised money to help pay for his knee surgery.

The strip he made about Lichtenstein — a one-page comic that Darwyn Cooke coloured and lettered — was first published in May 2012 in IDW's Hero Comics 2012. It reached a wide audience in November 2014, after the cartoonist Dylan Horrocks shared it on 1 November. As CBR summarised it, the strip says Lichtenstein became rich and famous while Heath received no payment, and that the Hero Initiative later supported him, including after knee-replacement surgery.

Novick has the least on record; the sources checked quote nothing from him. Dave Gibbons, the Watchmen artist, has spoken up for his panel. He calls the original more spontaneous and three-dimensional than the painting, Wikipedia's entry on Whaam! says, and he organised an exhibition of comic artists parodying Lichtenstein to protest Tate Modern's 2013 retrospective, CBR reports.

Drowning Girl: the page and the man who drew it

Tony Abruzzo's case shows what a settled attribution looks like, and how little comes with it. Wikipedia's entry on him says he was born in New York on 21 June 1916, trained at the Traphagen School of Fashion, took a pictorial-illustration certificate at Pratt in April 1937 and worked first as a dress designer. The Second World War took him to Fort Knox, where he illustrated tanks, scout cars and jeeps for training manuals and drew a strip, Randy Allen, for Armored Force News and Army Times; he left the army a sergeant. By the early 1950s he was at National Periodicals, where his earliest signed romance story ran in Secret Hearts #12 (October–November 1952), and from 1954 to 1972 he illustrated Girls' Love Stories continuously. The editor Robert Kanigher called him "the finest artist in the romance field, bar none." He died in Brooklyn on 30 December 1990, aged 74.

That entry lists at least seven Lichtenstein paintings from 1963–64 as based on his art: Drowning Girl, Crying Girl, Hopeless, In the Car, Oh, Jeff… I Love You, Too… But…, Ohhh… Alright… and Sleeping Girl. It describes the comic artists Lichtenstein drew on as people "who rarely received any credit," and does not say whether Abruzzo or his estate was ever paid. The only recognition it records is Image Duplicator, a 2013 show at Orbital Comics in London, curated by Rian Hughes and Jason Atomic, that exhibited his artwork.

The painting itself is a study in editing. Lichtenstein cropped the splash page sharply, removing the capsized boat, the boyfriend clinging to it and the wider seascape, so that the girl is alone inside a wave. He cut the caption from "I don't care if I have a cramp!" to "I don't care!", and the painted balloon reads "I Don't Care! I'd Rather Sink — Than Call Brad For Help!" The boyfriend, Mal in the comic, became Brad — a name Lichtenstein had already used in Masterpiece (1962), where a woman calls the painter "Brad darling" and pronounces his painting "a masterpiece." The result, 171.6 by 169.5 centimetres in oil and synthetic polymer paint, is evidence for the defence as much as the charge. Every one of those changes is a decision. What they leave untouched is the design of the girl herself.

Where the record splits: Anxious Girl and Nurse

Anxious Girl (1964) sold at Christie's in New York on 18 May 2026 for $39.5 million on the hammer, $46 million with fees, The Art Newspaper reported; MyArtBroker's analysis of the May sales gives the estimate as $40–60 million. Its source is the opening page of "Too Much to Ask!" in Girls' Romances #97 (1963). The Grand Comics Database credits that page to Mike Sekowsky (pencils) and Bernard Sachs (inks). Barsalou attributes it to Abruzzo, and says it is an interior splash page, not the cover. On 13 May 2026, five days before the sale, downthetubes, the comics site that ran the story, added an editorial note reporting that Barsalou had contacted it to say his credit to Abruzzo was correct and the database was in error. The site's image caption credits the art to Abruzzo, with thanks to Barsalou.

The database's credit is not absurd: Sekowsky was a regular artist on Girls' Romances from 1952 to the end of its run, Wikipedia's entry on the title notes, and it lists Abruzzo among the other artists. Nor is an editorial note a ruling: it relays Barsalou's view, and the sources checked here do not show whether the database entry has since changed. What the episode does show is that in May 2026, with a $40–60 million estimate on the lot, the artist behind a headline sale was being argued in a comment under a news story and answered, if at all, by an editorial note.

Nurse is murkier. The painting (1964, 48 by 48 inches) sold at Christie's in New York on 9 November 2015 for $95.4 million, Bloomberg reported, after selling at auction in 1995 for $1.7 million. Christie's said its image came from a comic romance novel of the early 1960s; The National wrote four weeks later that "there's still no agreement on exactly which novel it is based on." Artnet's Art Angle podcast, in an episode on the 2023 documentary, names the golden-age artist Arthur Peddy as the original artist and says Christie's did not mention him. Wikipedia's entry on Peddy, though, ties him to a different Lichtenstein painting, Sound of Music (1965), and does not mention Nurse, so the claim rests, in what turned up here, on the podcast alone.

Put the two sales side by side and a pattern shows. Nurse holds the auction record, and Anxious Girl is fourth on MyArtBroker's list of his highest prices. Each belongs to a painting whose original artist is, to some degree, in question.

What Lichtenstein said

In John Coplans's 1972 book on him, as Wikipedia quotes it, Lichtenstein drew a distinction that can be read two ways. On page 52:

"However, my work is entirely transformed in that my purpose and perception are entirely different."

On page 54:

"I think my work is different from comic strips – but I wouldn't call it transformation;"

The first sentence sits on the same page as a line that explains why he stayed close to his sources — "The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content" — which also appears in Lichtenstein's Dots Weren't Printed. Read alone, "entirely transformed" describes a change of purpose and perception, not of picture. Two pages later he is reluctant to use the word for the work itself, though the second sentence continues past where the sources checked here stop, so the reluctance may be qualified. On the evidence of these lines, he claimed a change of meaning, not a change of image.

What the sources checked do not record is any statement from him on crediting the artists, paying royalties or being sued.

The case for transformation

The defence has three parts. The first is that the paintings differ from the pages. Jack Cowart, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation's executive director, has put it this way, as Wikipedia's entry on swiping in comics quotes him:

"Roy's work was a wonderment of the graphic formulae and the codification of sentiment that had been worked out by others."

He adds:

"There is no exact copy."

The first sentence concedes the artists' point: the formulae were "worked out by others." The Drowning Girl changes support the second, since cropping and rewording alter what a picture says. It sits less easily with Anxious Girl, which downthetubes says copies the original "almost directly"; the differences it points to are small — in the original, it says, the heroine sits between the two men and her forehead bears no crease.

The second part is that the borrowing was an artistic act with its own logic. Alastair Sooke, writing for BBC Culture on 17 July 2013, said Lichtenstein "transformed Novick's artwork in a number of subtle but crucial ways," as Wikipedia quotes him. Bernice Rose said, in a line Wikipedia's entry on Whaam! quotes, that he was interested in "challenging the notion of originality as it prevailed at that time." Art Spiegelman told Publishers Weekly in 2007 that Lichtenstein "did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup" — a verdict that deflates the praise and the grievance together. For the decade's other great borrower, see Andy Warhol's Banana and When Pop Art Became Music Packaging.

The third is that nobody with a claim pressed it. The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation's position, Wikipedia's entry on Whaam! reports, is that publishers never sued for infringement and never raised the issue when the paintings first drew attention in the 1960s.

The case for credit

The other side is made mostly by people who draw comics, and it is about the pages rather than the paint. Dave Gibbons, interviewed by Sooke for a BBC Four documentary in 2013, said: "I would say 'copycat'," as Wikipedia's entry on Lichtenstein records it. The work, he has said, "owes a huge debt to the work of the original artist," in the words Artnet reports. The same report gives the comic artists' own word for the practice: they "have a different word for all of it: theft." The documentary's director, James Hussey, says he "was surprised about how closely many of Lichtenstein's paintings followed the original sources." He adds that the artist John Romita turned the film down because "he was too bitter to rehash the issue."

Comics has its own word for this kind of borrowing, and a long history of it. To swipe, Wikipedia's entry says, is to copy a cover, panel or page intentionally and without crediting the original artist. Jack Kirby was known to have swiped from Hal Foster early in his career, the entry says, and it lists the classic Batman pose on the cover of Detective Comics no. 27 as swiped from a 1937 Alex Raymond drawing of Flash Gordon; many Golden Age artists kept "swipe files." What separates a swipe from an homage, it adds, is generally whether the source is directly acknowledged or exposed by a third party. By that test, many of the specific identifications in Lichtenstein's case came from others — Overgard in 1963, Barsalou from 1979 — rather than from the artist.

Money sharpens the grievance. Nurse made $95.4 million in 2015 and Anxious Girl $46 million in 2026. Artnet says the documentary captures Heath's final days in a "dingy one-bedroom apartment," relying on charity for his groceries and a knee surgery, and quotes Hussey as saying that, had Heath and Eisman been acknowledged in the 1960s, "their careers and earning potential may have profited." For the longer history of putting a name to a work, see Why Artists Started Signing Their Work.

Why nobody sued

On the law, the record is thin. The foundation says publishers never sued. Artnet's account of the documentary says that if any suits were to be filed, "they should be coming from the comic book publishers," and adds, in a parenthesis, that they aren't. As far as the sources found here show, no court has ruled on the comic paintings. None of them says why, and a reason would be speculation.

The law has moved since the 1960s, though not in a way that settles this. In Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith, decided on 18 May 2023, the US Supreme Court held that the first fair-use factor — the purpose and character of the use — weighed against the foundation. In 2016 the foundation had licensed Warhol's Orange Prince to Condé Nast to illustrate a magazine story about Prince; it received $10,000, and the photographer whose picture Warhol had worked from, Lynn Goldsmith, received nothing, Stanford's fair-use summary records. The ruling concerned that licence. It was not a Lichtenstein case, and a magazine licence and a gallery painting are different uses. But it shows where such arguments are now fought: over what the new use is for, and whether it is commercial.

A lawsuit settles ownership and money, in any case. It does not settle whether the name of the person who drew the original goes on the wall.

What to check at the Whitney

The Whitney's retrospective is New York's first major Lichtenstein survey since the Guggenheim's in 1993, and the wall labels are where the question gets answered in public. For any painting that began as a comic, three things are worth looking for: whether the label names the comic, with title, issue and date; whether it names the artist who drew the page, rather than only the publisher; and whether it says what Lichtenstein changed. Tate's own writing on Whaam! does the first two for the template panel — it names All-American Men of War #89, February 1962, and credits Heath and Novick — which makes it a fair yardstick. How to Experience Art Exhibitions Meaningfully makes the general case for slow looking. For how a hammer price becomes a final price, see The November 2026 New York Auctions; for how to read a sale, The Collector's Guide to Art Fairs and Auctions.

What's established, and what isn't

Established: Lichtenstein built paintings from specific commercial-comic panels. Several of those panels are traced to named artists in sources that agree — Heath for Blam; Heath and Novick for Whaam!, both named by Tate itself; Abruzzo for Drowning Girl and, on Wikipedia's list, at least six other paintings. His own words claim a change of purpose rather than a change of picture.

Not established: whether any of the source artists was ever credited, asked or paid by Lichtenstein — the sources are silent, and silence is not a finding; whether Sekowsky and Sachs or Abruzzo drew the Anxious Girl page; which comic Nurse came from; and why the publishers never sued.

Not settled, and perhaps not settleable by facts alone: whether "transformed" is the right word. The Drowning Girl changes are real editorial decisions. The Anxious Girl page, on downthetubes' account, is a near-direct copy with small differences. Both can be true of the same painter within a year of each other.

The gap is itself informative. The paintings come with auction records and catalogue entries. The pages behind some of them come with a volunteer-built database, one researcher's Flickr archive and a podcast. The part of the chain that the comics themselves never printed — who drew what — is the part hardest to rebuild from the paintings alone. For how the dots themselves were made, see Lichtenstein's Dots Weren't Printed.