Widely regarded as the bridge between his abstract expressionism and pop art works, it is notable for its ironic humor and aesthetic value as well as being the first example of the artist's employment of Ben-Day dots, speech balloons and comic imagery as a source for a painting.

Building on his late 1950s drawings of comic strip characters, Look Mickey marks Lichtenstein's first full employment of painterly techniques to reproduce almost faithful representations of pop culture and so satirize and comment upon the then developing process of mass production of visual imagery.

[3] The National Gallery of Art notes that the source is entitled Donald Duck Lost and Found, written in 1960 by Carl Buettner and published through Disney Enterprises.

Critic Alice Goldfarb Marquis writes that the artist recalled one of his sons pointing to a comic book and challenging: "I bet you can't paint as good as that".

"[1] Art historian Jonathan Fineberg describes a Lichtenstein painting of 1960 as an "...abstract expressionist picture with Mickey Mouse in it, related stylistically to the de Kooning Women".

[16] During autumn 1961, Allan Kaprow, a fellow teacher at Rutgers University, introduced Lichenstein to art dealer Ivan Karp, the director of the Leo Castelli Gallery.

[3] The painting is one of Lichtenstein's first non-expressionist works, and marks his initial employment of Ben-Day dots which he used to give it an "industrial" half-tone effect.

In reproducing a mass-produced illustration in a painterly style, Lichtenstein simplifies by reducing the composition to primary colors, which serves to accentuate its mass appeal and largely gives it the "pop" look.

Lichtenstein as a painter and not a mass production printer is able to avoid this, achieving his individual color tones without blending existing hues.

[20] Lichtenstein made several alterations to the original work: he eliminated various figures and rotated the dock so that Donald looks off the side rather than the end.

[21] Lichtenstein not only redesigned the space, but also altered the position of Donald's body and fishing rod and eliminated signs of stress and exertion.

[22] He also adds a speech balloon, making Donald apparently unaware that he has failed to cast his rod, unlike in the original cartoon.

[25] The composition incorporates some of the foibles of comic book printing, including misalignment of the contours of the waves with the yellow sky to give rise to an area of white space.

According to Diane Waldman of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "Look Mickey is broad comedy and falls into the category of slapstick ..."[27] In Lichtenstein's obituary, Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight described the work as "a slyly hilarious riff on Abstract Expressionism".

[18] Lichtenstein's slight alterations to its "linear clarity and colour", the critic writes, add to its aesthetic value and grandeur, reinforced by his choice of scale.

[22] Graham Bader wrote that "Lichtenstein's painting in fact appears more the product of industrial manufacture than the very pulp image on which it is based.

He believes it can be considered a self-portrait in the sense that it "explicitly situates the painting's maker himself within the self-enclosed narcissistic circuit at its center".

In this sense, Lichtenstein has chosen to depict a source that has as its subject a divide between raised visual awareness and an absent sense of touch:[33] Donald is an explicitly divided subject, all sensory experience on one end and, literally, numbness on the other (and, visually, all depth and all flatness – for Donald's face is by far the painting's most spatially illusionistic element, while his caught jacket, merged with the schematic waves behind it, emphatically one of its flattest).

Indeed, Donald is a portrait of precisely the separation of sight and feeling, vision and touch… What divides vision and touch in Look Mickey, what marks this shift between them, is text: the words that Donald (and Lichtenstein) introduces to the scene, and which the duck's pole-cum-brush passes through before snagging his own back end.Lichtenstein frequently explored vision-related themes after he began to work in the pop art genre; early examples include I Can See the Whole Room...and There's Nobody in It!

[34] The painting was included in Lichtenstein's first solo exhibition at The Leo Castelli Gallery, a show in which all the works had pre-sold before its opening in February 1962.