Keep Circulating The Tapes / Webcomics

Nothing stays on the internet forever. Webcomics are no exception.^note Unless, of course, you preemptively save said comics and upload them on the Internet Archive's digital library, which is something that we at TV Tropes highly recommend you to do.

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• Any webcomic that's gone offline. Shredded Moose and Jungle Janet are two examples. Clan BOB's Life of Riley was a fairly big long-running comic that disappeared as well.
  • Life of Riley can be found save for a single missing comic at a mirror site. The community, clanBOB, that formed around it can be found here.
  • This is what happened to the webcomics hosted by online comics syndicator Full Tilt Features. Notably Lamtoon by Matthew Meskel, which was syndicated via RSS to LiveJournal at the height of its popularity. It went offline when Full Tilt Features went offline, and Meskel never continued the strip afterwards, so Lamtoon comics are now EXTREMELY rare (but still out there).
• Amazoness! was a webcomic by Xanthippe Hutcheon^note  written under her deadname as this was years before she came out as transgender that ran from 2007-2011. However, the domain name for the website lapsed and was taken over by a squatter. Only a few strips now circulate as blurry JPEGs online, though Hutcheon is gradually re-releasing the strip via Patreon.
• The comic The Artist is Dead! used to be a hand-drawn comic available through this website. Unfortunately, however, as the site broke and desperate attempts by the author to bring it back failed (only resulting in the site being back but the pages gone), the original copy of the comic is now gone. That being said, of course, the author has made the best of this situation by remaking the comic with actual photography instead of scans and posting it on his Tumblr account, where it will hopefully stay forever.
• The webcomics of Bengo & Pug, Scratchin' Post and Li'l Nyet, disappeared in 2009 when they Rage Quit the Internet over lack of donations. The Li'l Nyet website was reduced to a one-page piece of emotional blackmail, blaming a "mute audience" for their disappearance before the domain lapsed and became a filler page.
• The webcomic DOUBLE K used to be a notorious parody Fan Comic of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann that reimagined the show's setting by combining it with that of a Buddy Cop Show. But unfortunately, as the author abandoned the comic, he slowly deleted every trace of it from his web presence. The first thing to go was the online store, then the comic's site on Smack Jeeves, then the author's Tumblr and Twitter accounts, and then finally the comic's mirror on the author's DeviantArt account. Fortunately for the fans, however, the large readerbase that the comic had gathered meant that for every time the author deleted something from the comic, a copy of it could be found somewhere around the web, so long as you looked for it hard enough. As of 2017, DOUBLE K can still be fully read through an imgur mirror as well as several PDF files. The comic's site has also been thoroughly saved by the Wayback Machine.
• Everyday Cute, the predecessor to Pusheen the Cat, is dead in the early 2010s, and currently all of it is gone from the Internet; all that remains on the Tumblr is a handful of gifs. A few strips (including Pusheen's first appearance) are uploaded very early on the Pusheen website's comics log, which necessitates a lot of clicking to reach the last pages. The only way to actually read the Everyday Cute comics is via the Web Archive. Though, since it's very much Canon Discontinuity from the Pusheen franchise, there's no need to read it to enjoy Pusheen content.
• Fireflower, a retelling of Super Mario Bros., vanished from the internet a few months after its conclusion in late 2002. The Wayback Machine only has 3 strips preserved: two random installments from the middle of the story and the farewell strip.
• Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name's site has gone under and about 16 pages were posted to the Tumblr page back in 2014. To add to this, the blog implies that its current location is temporary and it doesn't seem to be available through the Wayback Machine.
• The Heroes Of Middlecenter went offline in the early 2010s. Because of a "robots.txt" script disallowed crawlers, the original pages cannot be retrieved by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
• Gigi D.G. took down their LiveJournal and Photobucket account for their Hiimdaisy video game comics, since they want nothing to do with them after starting their current comic Cucumber Quest. The most reliable source of their comics are fandubs.
• Andrew Hussie tends to run into this problem a lot. Fan website Homestuck.net has archives of most of his early web work, at the very least preserving the ones that got made into Mythology Gags.
  • His original webcomic website, Team Special Olympics, was eventually made defunct. The hyperlinked references on some of his MS Paint Adventures comics lead to empty pages, with the only surviving ones being the ones directly uploaded to the site.
  • Whistles was initially hosted on the website as well, and eventually was put up for digital purchase by Slave Labor Graphics. Neither of these collections survived. It was also printed into book format in 2007, but it had gone out of print in the years since.
  • Speaking of MS Paint Adventures, Problem Sleuth and Homestuck had commentated print runs that were published by TopatoCo. Problem Sleuth's five books eventually went out of print, as well as the three volumes of Homestuck that were made at the time (covering Acts 1-3). While similar annotations for Homestuck can be found in the later Viz Media collections, you're going to need to either track down an old copy of Problem Sleuth or check archive sites to read its commentary.
• For reasons the author explains here, I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space!!! is no longer available on its official site. Fortunately, there were full zip files posted for a while beforehand, and they're still floating around the net.
• Ichigomin, a showcase of different original Shoujo web manga featuring Sanrio characters, went down in January 2020 after a run of five years. Aside from their flagship series Ichigoman (which had the virtue of being rescued by Young Jump Comics for collection into book format), no other series was saved.
• Two comics, Land of Lost Mythology and Coma Dreams by the same author (Kasey aka Maelstrom) were known for an intricate and detailed art style reminiscent of Maurice Sendak, with compelling storylines and characters. Both comics ended in the middle of their story arcs, with no indication what happened to the author, or why work on the comics was dropped. An archive for Coma Dreams still exists, but Land of Lost Mythology is no longer available anywhere online and the author has been unreachable since 2002; and the old forum on The Nice is broken. Someone has made their fragmentary archive of strips available here and would love more; contact info available here.
• Kid Radd, a cult favorite among those who have been on the Internet a while, originally got screwed by the Internet with newer releases of IE and Firefox making the comic obsolete (the site was meant to work with IE5 and the original Firefox). Dan Miller, the author, did have multiple methods of viewing the comic — either on downloadable archives or sites where you could find the older versions of IE and Firefox that work perfectly. Unfortunately, AT&T shut down its WorldNet Web hosting server, taking all of Dan Miller's wondrous comic with it. Luckily, a fan has saved the online version on his own site, but the fanbase was sweating for a while there.
• The animated series Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts was based on a short-lived 2015 webcomic, simply called Kipo. The website was taken down in early 2019, before the first teaser trailer for the show was released. Some of the pages are still available to view on the creator's DeviantArt page, but you'll need to fire up the Wayback Machine if you want the rest.
• The webcomics British transportation artist Ruairidh MacVeigh created prior to When Heaven Spits You Out (the interconnected Maddie on the Island Hue, Maddie In America, and Outsiders, and the unrelated one-shot Red 348) have disappeared from the internet after he deleted all of them for reasons unknown, even making them unavailable to purchase on Amazon. Outsiders is particularly notable in this regard, as it was ongoing at the time, and its deletion left a lot of loose ends hanging. The last chapter of his first comic can still be found on DeviantArt though, as well as excerpts from the first three volumes of Maddie In America.
• The homepage for the Furry Webcomic Mandy has been shut down, taking all the comics with it. The only extant strips are floating around Deviantart and Furaffinity.
• Most of My Cage is MIA although it has started repeating on Go Comics.
• The site for Omoriboy, the original comic that inspired OMORI, was made private some time before the game's release. One of its companion comics, Omori's Story, had a limited print run on the OMOCAT SHOP. While the pages for both can be found on Omocat's blog (albeit with slightly different text for the Omoriboy posts), neither have been republished.
• A massive Creator Breakdown led Janet Harbinger, the author of pictures for sad children, to wipe the website clean. The comic site was even excluded from the Wayback Machine. The main comic and their work on various other websites have since been collected for underground distribution (though Harbinger has apparently been actively filing DMCA takedown requests against distributors). However, the extra Alt Text jokes are likely gone forever, and have been missing since a change of web hosts from back before said Creator Breakdown.
• The Ricky Ray Show went on a long hiatus in both its webcomic and its animated series, during which a test animation for a new style for the cartoons was shown but never ended up happening. The comic itself (as well as its companion series Becky and the Masters of Gaming) was wiped from the Ricky Ray website and rebooted with an updated art style and new character designs, as well as new relationships. This reboot only lasted a few strips, however, as Ricky Ray soon started a new webcomic, Space City Heroes that would go on to overtake the site, leaving no traces of the original Ricky Ray Show comic. He also deleted all of the Ricky Ray Show animations from his YouTube account, leaving Newgrounds as the only place to see anything related to the original series.
• Roomies, a furry webcomic by Dan "Flinters" Canaan, went offline in 2008. His VCL page hosts strips up to 2003, and the compilation Death on the Omnibus contains the entire strip, but good luck finding that...
• Spiked Math disappeared when its websites finally went under after a lengthy Schedule Slip. The comic has been preserved in the Internet Archive, however.
• Josh Mirman's Stubble ran from 2000 to 2006 with over 700 pages, as the author admits. The author just deleted everything from the site so fans can't read it anymore, because it wasn't up to his standards. Re-starting the series in 2010, it amassed only 71 pages by the end of 2011 and then halted. Now only two pages are viewable, and the rest are just gone.
• Jim "Mutt" Tarpley's two furry webcomics, Perki Goth/Candi Raver and My Little Private Hell, both went offline in 2008. The former exists as a somewhat broken but still mostly manageable Comicgenesis page.
• Todd Allison & the Petunia Violet was hosted on both SackJeeves and Inkblazers/Hiveworks up until its pre-Chapter 17 hiatus. When it came back to finish chapter 17, the Hiveworks portal fell through, and eventually the SmackJeeves portal went down when SmackJeeves itself went offline. The series was preserved on the Wayback Machine, however.
• Trane-generation was a mid-2000s gag webcomic focusing on strips involving transgender people (usually trans men, featuring the artist's Author Avatar). The website has since gone off-line and many of the comics with it.
• The domain to Trans Girl Diaries lapsed, making many of the strips unavailable.
• If a comic's name wasn't Wonder Momo, Bravoman, or Katamari, chances are it wasn't saved by Udon Entertainment by the time ShiftyLook went down. One person luckily managed to save all the comics before its closure, but sadly couldn't do the same for the tie-in videos on the site's now-defunct YouTube account. Additionally, all of the Klonoa comic was saved and is readily viewable on another website.
  • While the ShiftyLook YouTube channel was deleted, an account by the name of ShiftyLook Forever did manage to save all of the Mappy and Bravoman web shorts, and they can be found here on their channel. Sadly, the Wonder Momo anime isn't available on the channel, but Crunchyroll has all of the episodes up, if one is interested in viewing it.
• Wendy, the predecessor to Cute-Wendy and eventually Girly, was disavowed by Jackie Lesnick and for a time it was impossible to find the comic online. She eventually relented after restructuring her website, albeit with a disclaimer at the front noting it as a lesser work.
• Weird Bunnies and the Wilds by Glynn Mo. The comic, for anyone wondering, was about bunnies acting kinda like killerbunnies in some funny antics but, for some reason, Glynn Mo wiped the records clean of the comics' existence and suddenly vanished off the internet, aside from their Patreon page (which has them set as a patron, not a creator), around 2019. There was a compilation book released in 2017 but that was limited release and has since gone out of print. You could find some of the comics but mostly on meme sites.
• Roughly a year after What Birds Know concluded, the host website went offline and has remained so since. The Wayback Machine has the majority of the comic archived, but a handful of pages are currently lost.

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