Explosion (C.62) was made in 1967, when Roy Lichtenstein had been working with comic-book source material for the better part of five years and understood precisely what it could yield. The subject is one of the most repeated devices in comic-book illustration — the detonation, the graphic shorthand for force and spectacle that appeared in action and war comics throughout the postwar decades — lifted out of its narrative context and presented at a scale the original source never approached.

The composition radiates from a white core through concentric rings of yellow and red, the outer edges breaking into spiked rays and lobed cloud forms filled with deep blue Ben-Day dot patterning, everything held by bold black outlines that carry the authority of commercial printing at a size commercial printing never used. At this scale the marks stop reading as description and start reading as a system — a set of shapes agreed upon, over decades, to mean explosion, examined here as a formal construction rather than a depiction of anything real.

His distance from the Abstract Expressionist generation is nowhere clearer than in a work like this. Where Pollock had pursued energy through the direct trace of the body on canvas, Lichtenstein found equivalent dynamism in a pre-existing graphic sign produced not by a single hand but by a printing industry. The flatness and hard edges were not limitations to work around but the substance of the argument itself.

Explosion (C.62) sits among Lichtenstein's most concentrated early print statements — a work that asks, through the most stripped-down of graphic subjects, what it means to treat the conventions of comic-book illustration with the seriousness of fine art.

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