Badly written episode. It logically failed on every level. First off, the writers seem to think that each comic book is the original art. They are not. They are far removed from the original art. The original art is copied, inked, photographed and shrunk down, colored and printed. There would be no reason to forge the artwork. If one wanted to create a forgery, one would scan the original and reprint it, not redraw it. Why would you need to redraw it?
A comic from 1962 is supposed to be the rarest and most valuable? WTF? The rarest comic books are going to be from the 1930s, not the 1960s. Why was there only one in existence? Since the stupid premise of this episode was that a comic had to be redrawn to be reprinted and there was only one copy in existence, how did the forger redraw it if he didn't have that sole copy? Did this not occur to any of the producers of the show or do they not care.
What was the point of placing the stolen original comic in the auction? I'm assuming it was to explain how the original was acquired which seems pretty thin to me. The simple action would have been to send the original to the artist's wife anonymously after the artist's death. No explanation required. Going along with the auction premise, the real stupidity was placing the original in the auction for them to buy. Why? They already had the original. Buy a forgery and later you could claim the original was the one you bought at the auction. Again, it makes zero sense. It's just embarrassingly bad.
Incredibly stupid episode and easily the worst episode of the series. It's just stunning that nobody seems to notice or care how badly written it was. My best guess is that an existing script dealing with art forgeries was lazily adapted and changed to comic books to make it more unique. A lot of the lapses in logic could then be explained away. Just awful!
For the record, I have never used the word 'stupid' more in a review than I did for this one.
