This makes two, now. Two for certain; possibly more.
First was Malfunction Junction, one of the only journal comics I’ve ever enjoyed. Quality art and quality writing, especially some of the one-liners (“Hey man, I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this, but you have your mother’s nipples.”). It vanished without warning; so, it seems, did its creator. Some of the comics are recoverable through the Wayback Machine; others seem to be lost for good, except (presumably) on someone’s hard drive.
Today there was a second. Hate Song. A masterpiece of some of the crudest and yet wittiest humor ever encapsulated in comic form. I can’t even begin to describe it without breaking the rules of decency I set for this place. Until today, there was still hope for a final strip, a final ending to a story that stretched from redneck suburbia to prison to the city zoo to the digestive tract of a whale. But the creator has spoken, and the site is coming down. The archives are already gone; the farewell message is soon to follow.
I regret these losses, but I understand the reasoning behind them. Paying for a domain name and for bandwidth, especially on something that may never be updated again, or that only receives a handful of visitors in a month, is hard to justify. People move on from their earlier works, distancing themselves from efforts they might consider puerile. It is the way of things.
So to Matt Milby, Ed Brisson, and KC Green: thank you. Thank you for your creativity, your dedication, and your willingness to share your work with all us crazy folks on the ‘net. It’s been a blast.
