Yes, exactly. The reason it didn't work (and he felt it didn't work) is this: if you're doing a comic, you draw the subway entrance and the man, but you don't p

Yes, exactly. The reason it didn't work (and he felt it didn't work) is this: if you're doing a comic, you draw the subway entrance and the man, but you don't put in anywhere near as much detail as a photograph allows. That means the difference of 'man/not-man' takes up a far larger proportion of 'observable space', and extraneous differences are far less. 'iconic' means you focus down on what's relevant, and there's too much else to see in photographs :)