In the early 1960s a national magazine asked whether Roy Lichtenstein was the worst painter in America. Decades later one of his paintings sold privately for $165 million. This episode follows the quiet New York kid who sketched jazz musicians at the Apollo Theater, trained as a military draftsman, hid Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse inside abstract expressionist canvases, and in 1961 answered a challenge from his own son by painting Look Mickey.

The hosts explain the mechanics of his industrial painting style, the plagiarism controversy that still shadows his legacy, and the eclectic second act that ran from Van Gogh remakes to three-dimensional sculptures painted with flat shadows.

• What Benday dots are, why comic printers used them, and how Lichtenstein reproduced them by hand with perforated metal screens and quick-drying Magna pa ...