Old Shame/Web Comics

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Megatokyo author/illustrator Fred Gallagher is known for his self-deprecating remarks about his earlier work. His detractors once tried to use this to stain his reputation by revealing fanservicey early drawings of possible precursors to the comic's female characters; in response, he publicly revealed the whole "hidden" site, showing that he wasn't hiding anything - he was just embarrassed about his old art.
  • Before Heartcore, TL Welker did a gag-a-page comic called Unsound of Mind, where some of the central characters for Heartcore would originate from. She has long since discontinued UoM, and has stated whenever asked about it that she doesn't ever want to return to UoM.
  • Although Order of the Stick has always had simple art, it has gotten significantly better and more detailed as the series has gone on. Enough so that Rich Burlew has admitted that he hates having to draw the characters in their old styles (necessary for continuity purposes) when making bonus strips for the book collections. One design choice he particularly hates is the jagged lines that used to separate panels, so much so that he straightened them for the books.

Haley: Nah, that cast page was painfully outdated anyway. We all look deformed or something.

  • Before his explosive popularity as a games critic, and even before his modest popularity as the creator of the Chzo Mythos series, Yahtzee ran several shortish webcomics on his site, which he has now gone on to disown completely along with every game he made before The Trials of Odysseys Kent, as well as every work of fiction he wrote before the age of 20, as he doesn't want people thinking he actually cares about said work.
    • In a Let's Play of the series on the Something Awful forums, he indicated that he doesn't stand by the Mythos these days either, but considers it an important step in his learning about games.
  • Exterminatus Now is mainly based on mocking the daylights out of a setting that attempted to make Sonic the Hedgehog Darker and Edgier by adding Warhammer 40,000 themes. Eastwood has gone on record as saying something to the effect of "...made something good out of, in retrospect, the worst idea I ever had."
  • In its formative years, Platypus Comix contained no archive. Some cartoons were literally only up for one week and then vanished forever. The practice was originally due to limited storage space (it began as a Geocities site) but was continued until 2006 as a means of quality control (anything the author didn't regret making was given a position in a selective archive section). Most of the pre-06 works are still offline, but lately they have turned up in book collections.
  • Josh Lesnick, of Girly, took down his first comic down for this reason. As a result, a lot of people don't know there was a comic before Cute Wendy.
  • The author of My Roommate Is An Elf took down the comic for this reason. The art was painfully terrible and the writing was rough draft quality at best.
  • Tom Siddell has stated that he can hardly bear looking at the early pages of Gunnerkrigg Court.
  • Ethan Nicolle, the artist that draws Axe Cop, feels that way about Jesus Christ: In the Name of the Gun (a comic he drew and co-wrote) since he considers it a crude joke that went too far.
  • Ian Jones-Quarty, who has since gone on to work as an animator, cited his embarrassment at early pages (which were artistically crude and sometimes fanservice-y) of RPG World as half the reason he elected to abandon the series. The other half was Creator Backlash over fans dislike his side project in the comic.
  • JJW, one of the old guard of early-2000 sprite comics, has built a blog dedicated to tearing them a new asshole.
  • Linkara has no problem bashing the first volumes of Lightbringer, admitting that not only is the art terrible (which is why he now outsources the artwork), but that the stores are excessively preachy. He invoked the Trope Name when explaining this on one episode of Atop the Fourth Wall, saying he was "stupid and full of myself and didn't know any better" when writing it.
  • The Unspeakable Vault of Doom presents: "the horror... the horror from the past".
  • The Non-Adventures of Wonderella had an old video of Wonderella's mom. Wonderella bursts in flames.