Dick Tracy by Mike Curtis and Charles Ettinger for December 14, 2022

A clever scheme!

Ok, another wasted day of basically information we already had.

At least consistently is one of Mike’s strengths!

Nice ‘Pencil Effect’ to the sketches. ✨

Art’s bow tie shrank from before.

“Shelley, how could you make such a glaring mistake???”

LOL!!!

Good morning™, everyone!

There you have it. Paul will not be using Walmart paints, as someone speculated yesterday. He will be using “special paints” that presumably can fool an expert.

That’s “Salvator Mundi” that Dekko has on his computer. It sold for $450 million five years ago. If Dekko can get similar revenue, he can probably retire out of the scam game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvator_Mundi_(Leonardo)

Paul is going to slip up…they always do…

Good morning™, decoy masterpiecers !

Will they have to kill Pauly after they get the painting ?  After all the loot split to one … I mean TWO, will make living so much more comfortable. (don’t worry, baby. I have your interest at heart.)

Uh oh, Paul seems to be right handed, & art experts can tell right away if a painting was drawn by the right hand or the left hand, &, sadly for Art Dekko, da Vinci was left-handed. Nice try!

I still get the feeling that Mikey-Boy got taken, ever since the start with the George Reeves Super-Man costume.

Did he get scammed out of (with) some Super-Man memorabilia?

It IS possible to do some counterfeiting of the master. Egg Tempra is an easy paint to make (Heck, I made it in collage) But copy his /style?/ This I’d have to see.

I’ve seen literally hundreds of copies of the Last Supper at the store. Lots of excellent copies, some — well not so. But you can tell this isn’t a DaVinci. We even debate at times if that one chacter is a woman or man. It’s almost impossible to tell.

Roseanne will be so disappointed when she finds out that DJ is dating a mustachioed woman and scamming counterfeit da Vinci’s

Da Vinci, however, did not use canvas. You’d have thought Dekko might have researched that. His work was done fresco (Last Supper) or on wooden panels (Mona Lisa or the Salvator Mundi). While some artists were experimenting with using canvas it was another century before it came into common use.

Fortunately for Dekko, should he do a little research, it’s easier to find period wood than period canvas.

Perhaps adding the Smurf tat to Mona’s arm will provide Tracy a clue.

I’m sure that the claim of finding a previously unknown Da Vinci won’t get any scrutiny at all.

When today’s strip first appeared on my screen, the line I first read was “I’M NOT GOING TO SUE” without yet noticing the comma :)

FFS! MORE OF WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW!

(Yesterday, my AltTake had Art discovering that a DaVinci being sold on E-Bay. Do you think Mike quick rewrote today’s strip to incorporate that idea? No – me either. Still – “great” minds and all that.)

The “special paints” are made from dried turkey legs found only at selected Renaissance Festivals.

Uh, dude? You do realize you look nothing like a Da Vinci painting subject, right?

“Paul” should be wearing plastic gloves. Any contact his hands make with the canvas will leave his DNA behind.

1-ART: I don’t think you followed me the first few times I’ve told you the scheme. I’ll go slow. We’re…going…to…sell…a…fake…DaVinci…

2-…Some guy I met online claimed he saw a DaVinci sketch in a museum and that he could copy it and that anyone who backed the scheme could make MILLIONS!

3-…I’ve never met him but I trust him implicitly! Would someone online named after my favorite Apostle lie??? I fronted him every penny I had but it’ll come back to me like manna from heaven!

SUE: Actually, Paul wasn’t an Apostle. ART: Uh oh…

I would think a period canvas from that long ago would cost a pretty penny.

Any type of fraud above 400 thousand dollars will be investigated by the FBI. It took me 10 years to put one scumbag in jail for a scam on me and many other people. Two years was not enough. I still track Vernon Kostic and will until he dies !!!

The FTX scandal——Uppward Lee Mobile lives!!

He told Sue Reel the whole plan,which I wasn’t expecting him to do.Terrific first panel.

1980 STRIP DIALOGUE

“He’s used several women,Sue Reel among them,to climb both socially and financially.Art Dekko is a “Ladies Man”.

That’s t he polite word.The actual phrase cannot be printed here.

Every time Art Dekko comes into a room,the orchestra should play “Just A Gigolo”

MOVIE QUOTE—

“I can’t stand up to him face to face.I’d get a windburn”

Bob Hope—THAT CERTAIN FEELING—1956(referring to George Sanders)

Alas! Junior and Peanut Butter…this caper is beyond your pay grades.

“Undiscovered work by Da Vinci, is Tracy and MCU going to need assistance from Interpol and Scotland Yard?

Or Johnny Adonis will shake off the cobwebs.He began as the head of a special art theft bureau within the department.

The egg proteins in the paints will never stand up to the Carbon 14 test

And all will go fine until Deco’s clothing manufacturer puts a label on it.

Art’s art scam depends on how talented a forger Paul might be (and while it’s true that Da Vinci’s better known works, other than fresco, are mostly on wood panels, poplar or walnut, he may occasionally have worked with canvas, so that part of the scheme is at least possible, if a bit of a stretch [ahem!] ). The Salvator Mundi, widely thought to be at least in part painted by Leonardo, and sold for $450.3M, $400M hammer price plus some $50.3M in fees, is oil on a walnut panel….

List of paintings attributed to Leonardo in whole or in part: https://tinyurl.com/y2m8noa8