Happy Free Comic Book Day!

Nerds of the world rejoice! Today is the first Saturday in May, which means it's Free Comic Book Day!

My preferred method of celebration: grab a non comic-reading friend or relative, get out to your local shop, and don't leave until THEY pick out a comic.

Bacon Is A Vegetable Is A Rip-Off UPDATED!

So, first off, there's this blog called Baconation-baconation. I'm not linking to it directly because I don't want the three people who read this blog (hi mom!) to give them any additional traffic. I'll get to why they thought their blog was so nice they had to name it twice in a second. First, let me rant.

The blog itself is pretty terrible. The animated .gifs in the right-hand column are particularly distracting and annoying, and the content seems to be a regurgitation of other articles on the web, put there simply as a framework for click-through images of their CafePress products.

What really gets me, though, is that a good many of the products offered in the "Baconation" Cafe Press store are stolen images from other, talented, artists.

Example: They offer products with something eerily similar to this design (see above) by rstevens of Diesel Sweeties fame. Trust me, even if you're credulous enought to believe that two people could come up the the phrase "bacon is a vegetable," the other dudes' design is clearly a rip-off of Mr. Stevens' work.

As if that weren't enough, the Baconation jerks then decided to rip off one of my favorite bacon-related webcomics of all time from XKCD. I mean come on people, what's next? Stealing the title of your crappy blog from some other bacon-related blog? OH WAIT YOU DID THAT TOO.

UPDATE FROM RSTEVENS:
"The crappy Bacon is a Vegetable rip-off shirt was taken down thanks to all you rad Twitter people!"
Hurray for Twitter-based crowdsourcing!

Dorothy Knows How I Feel

(Click for a read-able version of the strip.)

Dorothy over at "Cat and Girl" captures the feeling I was trying to get across in my last post.

The First Pogo Possum Strip

My dad introduced me to the Pogo comics, and I quickly fell in love with Walt Kelly's style of drawing, his characters' outrageous dialects, and the often equally outrageous lettering styles that accompanied them.
Recently, I learned that Fantagraphics will be publishing a complete collection of Pogo daily and Sunday comics in the near future. And then, today, Drawn! tells me that there's a hi-res scan of the first ever Pogo strip up at the Arflovers blog. Click on Li'l Ol' Pogo over there for the link.

Making Comics - Chapter 5 1/2 Is Finally Up!

Those of us who purchased Scott McCloud's excellent "Making Comics" have been anxiously awaiting "Chapter 5 1/2," the promised online supplement that goes into detail about webcomics. I learned today that it's finally up over at Scott's site.