Okay, so I missed two days, and I'm about to miss three more, yup I got me a backpacking trip. My backs gonna hurt and some stuff is gonna happen, that's about all I know. Once I get back, I'm gonna start filling in holes in the archives that I left, but that's not a promise, so don't hold me to it.

Right now I'm wearing a T-shirt. It's one of my favorites, it has a Real Life Comics Strip on the back and it certifies that I'm the master of something called "Shirt-Fu" on the front. I like this shirt not only because it says that I can do awesome backflips and sweet matrix type manuevars with a Katana (Which I can't) It also says something else that I really like:
"I am a Web consumer"

You need to realise that Web Cartoonists aren't making any money off of just drawing the comic up every day and leaving it at that, we need to contribute something to their pocketbooks for them to be able to pay for the expenses of maintaining a Web Site. For me I prefer the option of buying totally sweet T-shirts to looking at Ads cluttering up the Web page. (A good example of this is www.theaterhopper.com and while it's a good comic otherwise, Advertisements really clutter the page up.)

Something that I think is the funniest about the way Merchandise is usually put out is thatnearly all of it is Ninjas, From MegaTokyo's old "N1NJ4" sweatshirt to Men In Hats' not out yet "Ninjas eating Tacos" shirts, they pretty much all share Ninjas as a awesome product. And why not? It's sweet, It's sellable, it's Ninja-riffic. Ninjas are really a good metaphor for the way these T-shirts set themselves up as a style too. Ninjas are nearly untraceable in every way, just like no one seems to notice that this is actually becoming a style. While everyone is obssesed with the latest Polo Shirts from Old Navy and what-not, we're kicking butt and taking names.

I don't know about you but I'm sitting here feeling pretty sweet in this "Master of Shirt-Fu" T-shirt right now. And while some people say that when a cartoonist starts selling merchandise from their comic, they're "selling out", I say How can you be selling out when you look this awesome?