Homo Sum » Blog Archive » A Blast From The Past

A Blast From The Past

You kids today with your webcomics, you don’t know how good you’ve got it. I remember the early 90s¹, when getting a comic on the web meant puerile Space Moose sodomy jokes or the banal comedy of Doctor Fun.

</crotchety>

Seriously, though, there’s a wealth of great stuff out there today–no one could read everything being produced, and just keeping up with the ones I quite like requires some effort. Part of my “morning rounds” of the internet includes opening a set of around 25 tabs to read the latest in the daily webcomics I follow, for example.

But, back in the 90s, I had one weekly web comic (we didn’t call it that then, since it was a print comic that happened to also appear on the web) I made of point of keeping up with. It was originally a strip in the university paper at my alma mater, and was drawn by a McLaren (no relation, that I know of). The strip was called The Parking Lot Is Full, and it had a twisted sense of humour and irreverence that often (but not always) lined up nicely with my own.

The full archives are online, even though the comic has been dead for five years now. You can even still buy the print collections.

Here are two of my favourites from back in the day–these are ones I cut out of the paper and kept pinned to the wall, along with the one funny Wizard of Id strip.

From September 19th 1997:
Love Sphere

From February 6th 1998:
Cops From Beyond

Remember kids, Red Meat didn’t appear online until 1996.(back)

Tags: benevolent surrealism,cartoons,nostalgia,webcomics

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Blog cliches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “A Blast From The Past”

Richard B. Says:
July 26th, 2008 at 9:32 am
1

I think you meant to type “crotchety” and probably not crotchey and definitely not crotchy. But, who am I to quibble over adjectives with a man who steals into hotels in the dead of night to deliver liquor-enhanced baked goods?
Mr. McLaren Says:
July 26th, 2008 at 9:40 am
2

Bah, you kids and your new-fangled spellin’.

On another matter, does this gmail address you are using now mean that the VNET days are over?
Richard B. Says:
July 26th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
3

I’ll keep paying the company that bought the company that bought Vnet, but yeah, switch to the gmail address. The company that bought the company that bought Vnet shut down the server I was using with no warning, because it was unaware that there were folks like me who still *like* 1992 style Internet access.