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  Roy Lichtenstein would've had the best tweetsJul 07, 2012 8:34 AM PDT | url
 
Added 2 new A* pages:The angst of losing a comic or social networking subscriber, Roy Lichtenstein style:
 
Image
 
Although in the long run, as long as you keep doing good stuff, it will generally work out okay.
 
The source image for that is Lichtenstein's 1963 piece, Drowning Girl—the words having been changed somewhat, of course; the replacement font is an itailcized form of the free font VTC Letterer Pro, which doesn't really match Lichtenstein's lettering, but I think it still looks pretty nice anyway. :P
 
While this is an outright copy-paste-Photoshop rip-off, it is interesting to note, as Wikipedia tells us, that Lichtenstein recreated the image and dialogue pretty directly from another source: a splash page in issue 83 of the DC romance comic, Secret Hearts, that came out in '62. And the waves, by Lichtenstein's own admission, were adopted from prints by the famous Japanese Edo-period printmaker, Hokusai.
 
Lichtenstein's real genius—the one for which he quickly became famous, anyway—was in the selection, distillation, arrangement, and presentation of comic art, and the style of crude emotion and violence it was used to convey—and he cranked this up to the maximum in his bold minimalist way. One trick was working big: Drowning Girl is nearly six feet by six feet. But he's also found and heightened a notably absurd moment of despair—couched in the odd language male comic book writers of the day often gave to their stereotypically emotionally overwrought and physically helpless female characters—popping out in the bold, super-sized Ben-Day print-style dots of color he used so powerfully.
 
And I just like the name, "Brad"—that was all Lichtenstein, I think. He used the name in several pieces (depicting domestically anxious women, generally, which was a peculiar and popular specialty of his), and once "stated that the name Brad sounded heroic to him and was used with the aim of cliched oversimplification." In the original script for the panel in Secret Hearts #83, the boyfriend's name is "Mal." ... I would say "Brad" was quite an improvement. (What the heck kind of English name is "Mal"? In French it means "Bad"...)
 
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Re: page 5: I hadn't realized there was a an Elvis Presley song called "Earth Boy" until I was Googling it today in my usual lazy procedure for gauging how likely I am to get sued when I give something a name. I figure I'm probably pretty safe in this case.
 
Re: page 6: I kinda like this style, but like most of my stuff it sort of happens unbidden, and I've only had it happen like twice before in A*, I think—those were fairly recent pages, though (episode 16, pages 82 and 95), so hopefully that means it's catching on in the part of my subconscious that decides how to draw things.
 
 
 
 
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