I find it amusing that this has been built up as big as it has been. It's just a crappy comic nobody reaRAB anyway.
"Swiping" isn't anything new in this industry either. DC and Marvel artists used to swipe entire Kirby pages all the time. Some of them have even admitted it.
Granted, Nick has been far more obvious about his swiping about it than most (really, he could at least change the renderings A LITTLE BIT), but I'm not sure I really need to care about this since his comic doesn't even matter to me, nor to pop culture in general.