Tom Lundin sends the following e-mail which felt like it oughta be posted here and answered…
I think condemning (however lightly) Roy Lichtenstein's use of preexisting source material for his artwork is somewhat disingenous and misses the point. Many fine comic artists themselves made use of published photographic material cribbed from magazines, newspapers or other sources and traced them with an Artograph projector, recomposing the images along the way to create a derived work. (Today, we'd call it "repurposing", but whatever you call it, it's a time-honored artistic technique. The Rules of Attraction website has an excellent history of photorealistic comics.)
As artists are wont to do, Lichtenstein took that technique one step further — pushing the artistic envelope a little and, perhaps, pushing the intellectual property boundaries a little more — by enlarging the essence of certain comic panels as standalone works of art.
That his derived works commanded thousands of times more money than the original art is less a comment on his art skills than a reflection of the relative value a culture places on various forms of art, entertainment, or sports. Art is what people say it is, and it's worth as much as they're willing to pay. In comic form, pages of art were worth 10 or 12 cents. In canvas form, one panel was worth a few thousand dollars.
Part of an artist's raison d'etre is often to try to make society look at something from a new perspective. You can't look at a picture of a Campbell's soup can label today without thinking of Warhol — well, I can't, anyway. So, too, Lichtenstein tried to redefine the comic panel in acrylic colors and larger-than-life size. Is it art? Is it new? Is it copying? Is it valuable? Is it wrong? The questions that the artist forces us to confront are often as much a part of the art as the object itself.
Well, the main thing I'd disagree with in the above is a personal aside — the use of the word "disingenuous," since I meant exactly what I said. Beyond that, we are into the shady world of to what degree a work of art can parallel another without being classed as plagiarism. The standards are murky and can only be adjudged on a case-by-case basis. I assume you agree that it is possible for someone to so totally copy the work of another that it does become an act of theft. All of the standards and questions of art can still apply, and the derivative work can still have its own value…but underscoring it all is that one artist has signed his name to work that was substantially created by another. I also think there's a substantive, obvious difference between basing a drawing on photographic reference, even when a tracing device is employed, and tracing another man's drawing. In the case of Lichtenstein and the comic artists from whom he borrowed, we're talking about exploiting an image that the other artist conceived from his own imagination. When Lichtenstein replicated a Russ Heath comic book panel, he was selling a visual that Heath conceived and transferred to paper, but doing so with neither credit nor payment to Heath.
That Lichtenstein's work has a standalone merit is not, I think, in dispute. Though I suspect his popularity was based more on transitory fad than on substance, people did buy his work and cram into galleries to view it. Apparently, they still do, so I wouldn't question that he did make people look at something from a new perspective. I just feel that he crossed the line between taking inspiration from an existing source and passing someone else's work off as his own.