Richard Stevens 3’s massively popular webcomic (read by more people than pretty much any printed comic book from Marvel or DC) Diesel Sweeties is now available as 10 downloadable, redistributable 100% free collected volumes. This may not seem like a big deal at first glance, but there are a lot of folks out there that will go to a lot of trouble to download, collate, collect and distribute strips, be they webcomics or the web-distributed versions of traditional newspaper comics. Until now, the main argument against this, aside from legal issues, has been that by downloading an unauthorized collection, you were taking money away from the creator of the strip since they weren’t benefiting from any ad revenue that would be generated when you clicked through their online archives.

Apparently Stevens has figured this all out. 2000 strips spread across ten volumes in pdf format, available for free with P2P sharing of them encouraged. You can give these to anyone you like, and as long as you don’t get paid for it, it’s completely legal. Pretty cool! I’d have liked to have seen them in CBR format rather than PDF, but beggars can’t be choosers and there’s no reason why you can’t DL and convert them yourself if you like.

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