Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Dave Kelly Lives....

...and is being plagiarized. If you remember the original links section of the site, you might remember that Dave Kelly's work was heavily listed there. Dave Kelly was the first online artist I ever really got into and it always made me sad when he stopped updating all his comics, started yelling at his fans, and apparently ran off to the Something Awful forums to do some Flash animation there. Of course now I can understand his reasons a little more, but once you're a fan of someone and they generally let you down....well, it happens. Its sort of why if I ever decide to stop updating the website, I'll let you guys know. Dave Kelly's taught me a lot of stuff, both good and bad.

Oddly enough he's resurfaced as some sort of posterchild for the webcomic scene. Of course, about five years ago he pretty much was there already. But now? Now he's getting ripped off by the guy who does t-shirt designs for Hot Topic. Pretty Blatantly too. Check it out:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2416213

The only thing I hope that comes out of this might be a resurgence in Dave Kelly. I always liked his stuff and seriously hated that he vanished from the scene as far as I could tell. Of course now that he's got all sorts of webcomic people backing his cause (from SomethingPositive to PVP to, well, lots of web-comic centric folks) maybe he'll come out of retirement. I mean, I know he didn't retire but if you don't update your site for three years and your best work is no longer online...I'm not sure what to call that.

Dave Kelly, I wish you luck and its great to see you again. You were one of the people that helped me figure out I needed to share my stuff online. Good luck getting that rich bastard to fork over some coin for ripping you off.
-jared

PS: Just to put Dave Kelly in context a little more:
Here's his Central page, showing both how prolific he once was and how the last time he updated it was on Halloween of 2004.
http://www.davekellycentral.com/
His new site, Shmorky.com updated more recently (for only a month over the summer of 2006), but if you look at it you'll find rather scathing commentaries of the more popular webcomics out there. If you're a webcomic junky, you might dig his vision.
(Not safe for work)
This one was my particular favorite, mostly because its pretty much true in regard to giant gonzo boobs:
Waspi Square as brought to you by Dave Kelly:
http://shmorky.com/d/20060522.html


I always liked Dave Kelly for beating his own drum. His "screw everyone" attitude was refreshing somehow. But him being the new posterchild for webcomic plagiarism? It's pretty surreal.

:Edit: I just realized the link to the Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter isn't set up properly. I'm away from my home right now so I'll fix it later this afternoon. Sorry about that boys and girls.

3 Comments:

Blogger Adam Holwerda said...

Wow. That guy is such a fucking douche. Todd Goldman, I mean. He gives the rest of us hard-working, actually creative people a bad name. Dear God, please kill Todd Goldman.

4:29 PM  
Blogger Collin said...

Holy crap! My brother was just showing me this last night. The Todd guy's not only ripping off webcomics, he's also ripped off... well, pretty much everything he's done, I'll bet. Roman Dirge – creator of the Lenore comic series – talks about it on his Livejournal post dated Monday, April 9th : http://taxidermied.livejournal.com/

Can't see a way to directly link it, but he brings up a lot of other comparisons.

I'm with Adam. Todd Goldman needs to be struck penniless.

12:22 PM  
Blogger Collin said...

Have you seen how much this Todd Goldman makes?

http://www.fascinationstart.com/todd_goldman

12:54 PM  

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