During a trip to the DCA in Dundee yesterday I started thinking about Steve Ditko. Ditko and Gene Colan and their work on Doctor Strange (still, the Marvel comic book that has lingered longest and most sweetly in my memory).

The reason was Hideyuki Katsumata’s love of eyes. All around the walls of the DCA, where the Japanese artist’s curious menagerie of monsters stalk, there are eyes. There are one-eyed monsters, faces with extra eyes, arms with eyes, hands with eyes in the middle of the palm (which in passing made me think of the first Batman comic I ever bought, Batman 231, which bore the cover legend “The Man Who Saw With His Fingers!”).

There were eyes in knees, eyes in groins, eyes in chests. So many eyes and so wrong all of them. Displaced and even disembodied. They made me think of Doctor Strange. They made me think of the Eye of Agamotto.

Katsumata is clearly as much influenced by pop videos (there are some lovely examples of his own on display), hip hop imagery and even religious iconography as he is by comics. And his one-eyed creatures presumably owe as much to Greek mythology as comic book imagery (the latter owing a lot to the former anyway). But there’s no doubt his visions of robots, multi-limbed monsters and floating eyes owes something to too much time poring over comic strips.

There is a long crossover between comics and fine art. Off the top of my head I can tell you that Picasso loved comic strips (George Herriman’s Krazy Kat in particular), that Lyonel Feininger, as well as being one of the leading expressionist painters, drew two comic strips, The Kin-Der Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World, and that Andy Warhol gave us his own pop art take on Superman.

And then there is Roy Lichtenstein. In Edinburgh at the moment there is an exhibition of Lichtenstein’s work at the National Gallery’s Modern One. It’s encouraging that the curators have displayed a copy of the original Girls Romance comic from which Lichtenstein drew the “inspiration” for his “In the Car” painting. A reminder that this imagery had origins not in Lichtenstein’s mind.

Lichtenstein’s interest was in the mechanical nature of comic book printing. Hence his fascination with recreating Zip-a-Tone patterning effects by hand. The question is, did he diminish the work of the original comic artists in doing so. Did they become – in his work and the art world that welcomed it – merely the providers of source material rather than creators themselves? You have to fear, yes.

In a sense of course my own reaction to Katsumata’s work reveals that I am a reverse Lichtenstein in a way. I look at art and keep seeing comics. That’s a misspent childhood for you.

Hideyuki Katsumata continues at the DCA until November 15. Artist Rooms: Roy Lichtenstein continues at Modern One, Edinburgh until January 10.