One of my favourite webcomics was the early (and now, late) “The Parking Lot is Full” written by Pat Spacek and drawn by Jack McLaren. It ran from 1993-2002, making it one of the earliest webcomics around, especially to have a large following.

I was sad to see, returning to one of my favourite webcomics, that a large portion of the archives are now censored.

The themes censored seem to be the an assortment of the following (in the setting of humour):

• Intravenous drug use
• Sexual content & sexual fetishes
• Violence
• Trademarked character/famous person
• Reference to Christianity
• Paedophilia/child molestation
• Illness
• Childhood education
• Abortion
• Sociopathy
• Racist organisation- holocaust/KKK/etc

Some of the choice of material to censor is frankly ridiculous as it is depicting consensual sex, IV drug use, violent content the likes of which is freely available on the internet and other things. While the depiction of some of the above can in some cases be considered to be bad taste, none of it is condoning things such as paedophilia, racism or violence. The humour is almost all well within the bounds of appopriate viewing on the internet.

The fair use of a trademarked character is another issue of course- my thoughts are that if something is a clear parody then not only is it legal but it is part of healthy artistic expression and should not be censored even though it has become common practice for organisations and their legal teams to send cease and desist notices.

Under SOPA, things would get much, much worse.

Without further ado, here are (most of) the censored strips.

See the full gallery on Posterous