Crying Girl belongs to the most direct and concentrated phase of Roy Lichtenstein's work with comic-book source material. Made in 1963, the lithograph isolates a single panel image — a young woman, tears running down her face, her expression locked in a state of exaggerated anguish — and submits it to the conditions of fine art printmaking without any attempt to moderate or contextualise its emotional content.

The image is built from the repertoire Lichtenstein was in the process of making his own: bold black outlines defining the figure's features and hair, Ben-Day dots structuring the skin tones with mechanical regularity, solid planes of primary colour occupying the remaining fields. These were the strokes of the printing press rather than the artist's hand — the world of mass-produced illustration elevated to the scale and seriousness of gallery work.

By stripping the image of its narrative context — no caption, no panel sequence, no story — Lichtenstein forced the emotional codes of the comic book to become visible as codes. The crying girl does not cry; she performs crying through a set of printed signs that the viewer recognises from mass media.

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