Bull II (C.117) takes the representational image of Bull I and begins its transformation — the bull's form now rendered in blue against a diagonal hatching ground, its outline simplified, the cross-hatched texture of the earlier work replaced by the bold, airless marks of Lichtenstein's print vocabulary. The animal is still clearly a bull, its stance unchanged, but the register has shifted decisively: this is the bull as a printed sign rather than a naturalistic description.

The introduction of the characteristic blue and diagonal hatch marks was the key formal move. These were the marks of his mature print language — drawn from the visual world of mass-produced illustration — and by applying them to the bull's form he began the process of pulling a traditional representational subject into his own system. The bull in Bull II (C.117) remained recognisable while being translated into something else entirely, the two conditions held simultaneously in a way that the preceding work had not required.

The series proceeds on the understanding that each print is both a discrete object and a step in a sequence — a demonstration as much as a work in its own right. Bull II (C.117) is the point at which the departure from representation first becomes legible, the direction of travel established and the distance still to cover already apparent.

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