Shipboard Girl, made in 1965 as an offset lithograph in an edition of 3,000, is among the most carefully resolved of Lichtenstein's early figure prints. Shipboard Girl presents a woman in close-up — head tilted back, eyes closed, lips slightly parted in a state of dreamy absorption — placed against a simplified nautical background of ship's rail, life preserver, and open horizon. The nautical setting placed the figure within a specific register of postwar American popular imagery — the romanticised ocean liner, the holiday of the wealthy, the melodrama of departure and longing. The woman's features were drawn from the established types of romance comics: the idealised face, the perfectly drawn hair, the expression calibrated for maximum emotional legibility. These types, isolated from their narrative context and presented at print scale, became as much the subject as the figure herself. The choice of offset lithography in an edition of 3,000 was itself a considered statement.

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