Comic: The Parking Lot is Full
Writer: Pat Spacek
Artist: Jack McLaren
For this week’s webcomic we need to be prepared, get out your shotgun and rope, cover any exposed flesh and tie your running shoes tight, because here…’thar be zombies’. That is right, this webcomic has been dead since 2002.
Why have I dug up this decayed and forgotten web entity? Because it was that damn funny and deserves to be shared. Also, it was quite popular in its day. Many of its topics are timeless, as easily understood today as they were then.
Warning: This webcomic is dark humor and may be considered offensive. Dark humor is nothing new, from Aristotle’s The Poetics, Dante’s The Inferno, Kafka, Vonnegut, Twain and hundreds of others, it is a part of our nature. It is a motif often found in other webcomics as well. But, where other webcomics occasionally dip their foot into the dark churning pools, PLIF dives in and revels in it, while laughing insanely.
From the PLIF’s database of comic themes:
Abortion, aggression , alcohol, bureaucracy, cannibalism, censorship, childhood, cloning, conspiracy, consumerism, crime, death, disability, discrimination, disease, divorce, drugs, education, holocaust, insanity, linguistics, literature, love, media, military, nihilism, political, religion, sex, suffering, suicide, superstition, technology, world domination
Time seems to have erased most traces of the writer and artist, even their post-PLIF projects are no longer live websites. In an old article the writer, Pat Spacek, commented on his comic-creating vision:
“I’d probably end up writing the kind of characters Kafka always used to do. Wimpy losers crushed by forces they don’t understand, able to dredge up some kind of dignity but not being able to make it mean anything. Someone with an unconscious streak of masochism.”
The elements of existentialism definitely exist in Spacek’s writing; angst, despair and absurdity. But there is also meant to be a spark of hope originating from within the individual. I feel that Spacek shows that as well in some comics where he rants against an unjust system.
Philosophical considerations aside, the point of the various themes may or may not make you think, but they most certainly will make you laugh, even if its an uncomfortably chuckle.
