Plenty of news to get this week started off right, including a big name comics publisher with more webcomics collections in the works and yet another plagiarism scandal, with the work being displayed on T-shirts this time around. Let’s get right to it, shall we?

– The biggest story in webcomics right now is, unfortunately, a negative one. Jess Fink, creator of the deliciously filthy Chester 5000 XYV and Dirty Limericks over at AdultWebcomics.com (links absolutely NSFW), has had a T-shirt design of hers (pictured below) stolen and sold to the folks at Hot Topic for sale in their shops. The crew over on Fleen, friendly rival and also-ran of Digital Strips, appear to have a LOT of free time and have written about the situation here, here, and here.

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As part of the Xbox Live XNA Game Studio announcement at the recent Game Developers Conference, a game based on the popular webcomic, Little Gamers, has been released as one of seven demos for possible future video games.

I’ve taken all seven games for a spin and though they offer a wide breadth of gameplay types, Little Gamers the demo is up against another game in its side-scrolling beat-em’-up genre, The Dishwasher. Both feature stylized graphics, though the gameplay of The Dishwasher stands out a bit more by offering more depth than the move left or right and hit attack straightforwardness of Little Gamers. Dan “Shoe” Hsu, current Editor-In-Chief of Electronic Gaming Monthly, sounds off on his blog by saying:

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Attention, webcomickers: Irish blogger Purity Brown looks at the standard webcomics interface and finds it good; and she asks that if you deviate from it, please have a good reason for doing so. And she comes up with some user-unfriendly examples of dead tree media, too. Let me add my own: the MySpace comics page, which is sort of like Scans_Daily only not divided into, you know, individual posts.

Brian McTavish pens a nice story on Zuda for the Kansas City Star. It starts out a bit breathless at the notion of comics that aren’t about superheroes (get the smelling salts, Martha!) and people having dialogues in the comments, but it gets better once he starts talking to the creators. Meanwhile, DC’s Ron Perazza has asked folks how they think the site can be improved, and the discussion is hot and heavy. (Hat tip: High Moon writer David Gallaher.)

Mitch Clem is going to kill some trees! Yes, his indy music comic Nothing Nice To Say has been picked up by none other than Dark Horse for print publication. Also, Mitch has a new comic, My Stupid Life, that is quite funny and worth a click on its own merits.

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If you’ve never read Brad Guigar’s Evil Inc. now is a great time to mend your foolish ways. Evil Inc. has made the big jump into full color. With the help of his new colorist, Geek Tragedy’s Ed Ryzowski Guigar is making the evil parts of the Internet all the more colorful.

There are several things good about this new arrangement.

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Any time a famous creator from any medium, be it comic books, movies, or television, decides to grace the growing suburb of Webcomicville with their presence, it’s up to us, the media (stop laughing) to cover it. We are the ones who must ask the questions like, “Why use webcomics over the tried-and-true medium they usually work under?” and… ok, that’s pretty much the only question we need to ask.

But it’s a valid one and with the recent launch of Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield’s FreakAngels, a post-apocalyptic take of a partially-submerged London and the telepathic teenagers who may have submerged it, that question is also timely.

Luckily, this project is so huge and so anticipated, that bigger news outlets have conducted interviews with both Ellis and Duffield, interviews in which they asked this exact question. Chris Arrant of comics news site, Newsarama, found that Ellis’ answer in particular shows that he seems to understand the medium in which he is invading:

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T Campbell has posted his latest webcomics survey at Webcomics.com, basing his rankings on Alexa and Compete, and he goes on to discuss the results in detail. The top ranking “comic” in the Alexa survey is I Can Has Cheezburger?, which some people may find disturbing but T thinks is a legitimate inclusion. PostSecret is in there too. But check the rest of the list; you might be missing something good.

Also worth watching at Webcomics.com are their featured webcomics; I checked out The Process yesterday and was mightily impressed. It’s beautiful, mind-boggling, and intelligently designed. The art is beautiful, closer to watercolors than cartooning, and everything ties together in such a neat way that you can’t help but admire the full package. There are just two chapters up so far, so it’s a propitious time to jump in and start reading.

At Fleen, Anne Thalheimer is very taken with Sin Titulo, which I think is perhaps the best of the excellent Transmission-X webcomics. It’s a mystery/suspense story with a simple look and feel that drew me in right away.

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Anything Warren Ellis does is news, pretty much by definition, so it’s big news that his webcomic FreakAngels will launch tomorrow. Warren writes it, Paul Duffield draws it, and it updates once a week with a five-page installment. I’m not sure what I think about that format, actually, but I guess we’ll see.

Katsucon is this weekend, and they’re climbing on the webcomics bandwagon big time this year. Phil and Kaja Foglio, Chris Hastings, and the Applegeeks creators will be there, there’s an Epic Webcomic Win contest, and unlike San Diego, you can still get a hotel room. Plus, it’s named for a breaded pork cutlet. What’s not to like?

Artists wanted: Manga publisher Go!Comi is looking for an artist to create both a webcomic and a print manga aimed at teenagers. They are already publishing Wendy Pini’s Masque of the Red Death, which has a really unusual presentation, and their other non-Japanese property is Japan Ai: A Tall Girl’s Adventures in Japan. The rest of their line is translated manga from Japan, most of it of high quality and well produced. According to the post, they are looking for an experienced artist for a property that is already in development.

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As webcomics creators, many of us are happy to simply have an outlet for our creative energies. However, once you make it big, nothing gives you that high more than earning respect from your peers, especially the ones who have done it longer and bigger than you (or so I’m told). Recently, Scott Kurtz (un)officially joined that club of awesome creators.

The news was tucked away in a PvP blog post titled after the terrifying final words of Brad Pitt’s character in Se7en (What’s in the box?). After viewing a very satisfying strip in which Brent’s dad, being the heroic and steel-jawed man that he is, decides to single-handedly solve the “panda problem”, I got curious.  And being the curious fella I am, I scrolled down to find the aforementioned post, accompanied by a puzzling Garfield logo emblazoned on what looked to be a manila folder. I clicked through to investigate.

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