Missing Episode/Web Comics

• The original form of Strip #43 has only been mentioned in the author's (Scott Ruhl) comments. Even the webmaster of the site has never seen it - although considering the pun involved with the final strip, one can imagine why Scott Ruhl withheld it from publication.
• A lot of the original Magiversity strips were lost when Drunk Duck crashed in 2005, as the creator didn't have backups.
• This Penny Arcade comic was taken down after a cease-and-desist from American Greetings.
• Most of David Willis's "proto-Shortpacked" strips have been completely removed from his sites. A few were later on brought back when some filler was needed, but the majority are gone.
• The website for Platypus Comix is missing several stories from Mulberry, Keiki, Scrambled Eggs, and the Variety Section. Most of them have apparently become Old Shames for creator Peter Paltridge. Examples that should stick out to people who don't read the list he wrote of all the comics he posted on the website include the first Mulberry comic, the second Keiki story^[1], and half of "Raiders of the Lost Arc" (one of the comics found in the Variety Section). Sometimes, he publishes books containing comics he deleted from the website.
• The Internet era has created a new type of Missing Episode. Increasingly, promotional web-only tie-in stories or games are used on official sites to promote a product, event, or work. Once the promotion has run its course, the official sites may disappear, along with all that tie-in material. And the relative complexity of a web-hosted multimedia work makes it difficult to just Keep Circulating the Tapes. To take just one illustrative example, comics writer Gail Simone wrote a Superman interactive webcomic story for an official Pepsi Superman Returns promotion. Since the Pepsi promotion ended long ago, and its site is now defunct, if you didn't read it at the time, odds are you never will.

1. ↑ Actually, the part where the archive skips from 1 to 3 skips over more than one story