Pulp History

Popularized serial romance novels and comic books are a glorious trove of reference material for artists that incorporate popular culture and printed media ephemera into their work. Pulp fiction, comic strips, and comic books have left a tangible, ingrained presence in our collective memory. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s American painters began experimenting with adapting the style, imagery, and characters from comic strips into their work. In fact, some of Andy Warhol’s earliest known paintings were almost direct iterations of the style Roy Lichtenstein became so well known for. For a period, some of Lichtenstein’s early works focused on extreme close-ups of distressed women such as his 1964Crying Girl,in a parody of literary and artistic tropes inherent to his source material.

Often, the final effect of these pieces is the impression of an almost direct copy of the original, meticulously re-created in an ode to commercial printing. However, the work takes on new meaning through an enlarged format, cropping, the flattening of form and color, as well as the disassociation from original context.

Greg Miller builds on this history of pop culture and media appropriation, creating a dialogue with the established visual language of Pop art. In Miller’s work a familiar yellow haired girl makes an appearance in numerous iterations. She is at once instantly recognizable, yet pinpointing a direct source proves difficult, as we are not given enough information to discern her exact identity. In Hero, she appears in a chaotic, action-packed composition, but this is not the teary-eyed girl of Lichtenstein’s world. Here, she is part of a power dynamic that features Marvel universe super heros. In the bottom left half she is pictured with a scoffingly haughty expression, perhaps giving some sage words of advice to the superheroes depicted. In the four aces series, she shows up again, her guises ranging from the femme fatale in“A” Heart/Is That Better, to the girl next door in“A” Diamond/Victory. We are instantly drawn to her familiarity, her identity both a play on the very origin of her trope’s existence as the nameless girl on countless pulp romance book jackets, the Mary Jane of the comic book world, as well as our own childhood associations.