[3] During the late 1950s and early 1960s a number of American painters began to adapt the imagery and motifs of comic strips.

These works served as prelude to 1964 paintings of innocent "girls next door" in a variety of tenuous emotional states.

[10] Hopeless is a typical example of Lichtenstein's Romance comics with its teary-eyed face and dejected woman filling the majority of the canvas.

Lichtenstein made modifications to the original source using vibrant colors and bold and wavy lines to intensify the emotion of the scene.

"[11] In works like Hopeless, Lichtenstein derived enduring art from a fleeting form of entertainment, while remaining fairly true to the source.