Glad to learn that he did indeed have more than just the one idea, though I think that the returning to that one idea repeatedly  - to the extent that it's become his signature - means my point still stands. But I do respect him more for knowing that he did other things, and I will try to take a closer look at the entire spectrum of his work one of these days.

And I agree - I wouldn't call it "swiping" in the sense we've been using it in this thread, which is a sense limited to comics, really. But, and this may seem paradoxical, I wouldn't say that that automatically absolves him from the charge of plagiarism.

Comics art of the 40s and 50s was never and never claimed to be fine art. And many American comics artists no doubt saw their job as not much different from that of a mechanic or an industrial designer. But some didn't - Kirby, would be an obvious example. I suspect Russ Heath, as well.

But I'd also keep in mind that, American culture being what it is, even those artists with genuine artistic impulses and goals would often hide or downplay those motivations, probably even to themselves. Kirby always talked about himself as a guy who was just doing a job, providing for his family, but the work speaks for itself and contradicts that purely practical, workmanlike attitude again and again.

As so often, we tend to speak in absolutes for the sake of brevity and to get our point across strongly, but we're almost always dealing with gradations of sense or quality rather than strict black and white, either/or categories.

What Lichtenstein and Warhol were saying was that, in a way, comics art and commercial art are not actually art - that they are in fact more like the porcelain urinal Duchamp took and MADE into art by taking it and re-contextualising it, to stick to the term we've been using in the thread. I think that's both ignorant and insulting to the artists whose work he copied. I'd even say the same, but to a lesser degree, about a similar use of purely commercial art.

And as I said before, it's also, IMO, simply reiterating a point that had already been made by Duchamp - and made in a much more extreme and striking manner, I might add: the porcelain urinal is about as mundane an object as you can think of. So, while I acknowledge that there was a point to Lichtenstein's re-created comic book panels, I think they were already derivative from the start.

Also much less courageous than Duchamp's urinal, as there is an inherent aesthetic value to the originals of those comic book panels: no matter how cookie-cutter you think they might have been, they were made to be attractive to the eye in the first place (granted, so was the urinal, but to a much lesser degree and in a totally different way from the comic book panel). So Lichtenstein was making kind of a safe choice there: his copies of those comic book panels are attractive and pleasant to look at - because so were the originals.

As for their popularity, that's neither here nor there, for me - though it's partly explained by the paragraph above. As with movies, comics, books, music, etc, popularity in itself doesn't make anything either good or bad - though it always lends it an interest in a sociological/psychological sense (why is it popular?). The most popular works in any field aren't always the ones remembered a hundred years later - but sometimes they are (though not as often as contemporaries might expect).

Probably because Wally Woods aren't as obvious. I look at his illustrations and I do not see obvious lightbox use. It's also not a bunch of creepy porno facial expressions and poses that are completely out of place, and none of them are swiped from the cover of this month's most popular magazine or entertainment media's favorite celebrities.

I'm wondering how much of Wally Wood's swiping was actual tracing, and how much was actually just "copying" ideas, inspiration. Or custom shot photo reference that he owned/commissioned/created and didn't clip out of a magazine. To me there is a big difference in that. Although the act of lightboxing it is the same, the fact that it's still original material and not something you've seen elsewhere still makes it new material. Like that cartoon Fire & Ice, completely rotoscoped, but not out of a popular movie from the day.

Because Land is an incredibly lazy swiper and he sucks at sequential story telling.

He does not pick images to swipe because they serve the story, but because the result looks "realistic" and sexy. His characters smile when they they should not be smiling, and they often spread their legs for penetration when they should be kicking ass.

Because Wood was working in a day when the only way to make a decent living drawing comics was to crank the pages out as fast as humanly possible, thanks to the worst pay rate in commercial art (Kirby could do it without taking shortcuts--although one could argue his whole style became a shortcut--but he was the exception to the rule). Even adjusting for inflation, Land is paid more for a single cover than Wood made for several months' worth of pages.

Cei-U!
The defense rests!

And Land did some real nice work on volume one of Birds Of Prey.

I always wondered what the deal was with Lichtenstein. Never really liked his work, but could sort of see the "point" of the images sometimes. I did not know he swiped so completely though, including the scripting. I thought he was just emulating a style. I've just lost even the small amount of appreciation I had for his work.