Sinfest by Tatsuya Ishida

Webcomics are kind of like books, right?

Note: This article contains a lot of comic strips that don't fit nicely on my blog's layout. They are as large as they need to be in order to be nicely visible and readable and for this reason I apologize for how they fail to fit nicely on the blog.

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So let's talk about my life. More specifically, let's talk about my life and webcomics. More specifically, let's talk about my life and the webcomic Sinfest. More specifically, let's beat a dead horse and retread what many others have, at this point, basically said better than I can.

When I was a young boy growing up on the internet I became somewhat big into reading and following webcomics. I loved that there were just thousands of comics out there all being drawn by different people and following different stories. They were like books in that sense, only way easier to consume and I could have porn up in another tab while enjoying comics; all sort of creating a kind of confused mental stimuli for my brain that would leave me deeply fucked up for many years to come.

I eventually fell out of following webcomics around, I dunno, maybe 2011? I had several favorites, like Blip, Much the Miller's Son, Oglaf, and of course the masterpiece that is Rice Boy. Each of these comics are very high-end in terms of art, writing and the impact they had on me as I read them. My absolute favorite webcomic, however, was Tatsuya Ishida's Sinfest. Holy fuck what a great god damn webcomic Sinfest was. It was able to be aloof, deep, charming, inspiring, beautiful and hilarious all at once, despite the fact that unlike most webcomics of its caliber, it was a gag-a-day format with no story or developing plot. 

Sinfest has been written and drawn, released on an almost flawless daily schedule since 2000, by Tatsuya Ishida, a Japanese-American man who somehow finds the time to create and upload EIGHTEEN FUCKING YEARS OF DAILY COMIC STRIPS. Some people have gotten the incorrect assumption that Tatsuya draws a comic every day and uploads it on the day it's created, though this is a misnomer. The man obviously draws large chunks of strips all at once and then uploads one strip at a time every single day. This factoid is actually going to be very important later on in this post, so remember it.

I first discovered Sinfest in around 2007. Little did I know that, in retrospect, this would be a somewhat pivotal time in the webcomic's existence for me to start reading it; but more on this later. I was exposed (lol) to the comic by an online friend I was talking to at the time and I spent what was probably 4-5 god damn hours reading most of the comic's then seven-year-long collection. This wasn't a very difficult feat, for despite the sheer volume of comics that I had to read through, the majority of Sinfest strips are very basic and sometimes very minimalist. Yet despite that, however, still manage to be beautiful, touching, funny, poignant and a list of other strongly evocative adjectives. 

So basically, Sinfest follows the main character of Slick, a pint-sized kind of bastardization of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbs. You remember Johnny Bravo, right? That's basically who Slick is. A womanizing, ill-witted egotist who nonetheless has a heart of gold. His romantic interest in Monique, a strong independent young woman who embraces her sexuality and fights against society's skewed views of women and sex. Slick and Monique develop a very fun quasi-relationship where it eventually becomes strongly hinted that Monique has obvious feelings for Slick and would act on them if Slick would stop being a lovable jackass and drop his 'pimplife' facade. 

The cast expands into Slick's best friends: Squigley, an anthropomorphic fratboy stoner pig, and Criminy, a quiet bookworm. There's also god, Satan, Jesus, Buddha, some succubi and a bunch of other crazy shit. You may be wondering why the fuck I'm wasting so much time giving you a rundown of the cast, but the thing I'm trying to get across is that Sinfest was bursting with unique character and charm (hey, by the way, notice how I just used the word 'was' right there? Yeah well, remember that.)

Hell, the very first strip of the whole comic, written way back in the ancient year of 2000, basically entirely summarizes the general tone that would follow the comic for the rest of its original duration (hey did you notice how I just used the word original there well REMEMBER IT).

Pictured: Something funny and amusing

Okay so this is Sinfest's first ever strip and there's so much to examine in it that tells a lot about the strip's humor and, further than that, its integrity as a product. First of all, we see our main character Slick approach Satan's 'anything you want' booth. After stopping and considering for a moment, Slick utters the four-panel strip's only dialogue, a simple "What the hell.". While the comic's art would improve a bit as time went on, you can see artist/author Tatsuya Ishida's trademark bubbly, somewhat minimalist style. What's more is that if you carefully study Satan and his booth, you can tell that even though the booth and Satan himself remain completely motionless through all four strips, they are uniquely drawn every time and are not the same drawing copy/pasted. A lot of other comic artists, especially in the year 2000, would've just drawn Satan at his booth a single time and then literally MSPaint copy/pasted the doodle to all four panels. Tatsuya chose to go through the effort of redrawing and re-inking the same thing four times. This speaks volumes about Tatsuya as a person, as an artist and as a comic person guy. 

While the comic's very original style was pretty basic black humor, after a couple of years it began to mature more into a wholesome and introspective slice-of-life kind of deal where the characters started to grow a little bit, especially in relation to each other. Early strips could also be very non-sequitur, with some strips being a random self-contained joke that involved none of the comic's usual cast or situations. This lead to some rough installments, with some of these non-sequiturs failing to capture the same level of humor or charm of the normal character-driven comics but hey whatever it's a fucking webcomic.

Pictured: Something that is simple, charming, amusing and leaves you wanting more

Monique makes her first appearance a few strips in. She starts out as some kind of slightly punk-hipster beatnik free-sexual chick who smokes weed, but quickly evolves into a slightly punk-hipster beatnik free-sexual chick who smokes weed who is in foil to Slick's womanizing attitude. This is what makes the two characters fun to watch and gives them a great, natural chemistry with each other. Monique is freely sexual and doesn't let her promiscuity define her negatively. She respects women, men and herself. Slick is a goofy egotist who also embraces his sexuality but does so in a negative way. Slick doesn't respect women and ultimately doesn't really respect himself, as he's too busy putting on a womanizing front to chill out and actually be himself.

See! That's chemistry! These characters have fucking chemistry!!! Like, they can compare and contrast to one another and their similar-yet-fundamentally-different personas make them close to one another while still at ends. IT'S FUCKING CHEMISTRY. Hey, for the record, if you're wondering why I'm screaming so much about chemistry- well, remember this because it's important for later.

In Sinfest, the character of god is represented as being two large hands in the clouds that can communicate with the characters below on earth. God is presented as being somewhat of an egotist and sometimes even kind of a bully, though ultimately just wants everyone to be happy with what they have and wants to do the best he can. Satan is a suit wearing conman/businessman out to tempt people with sin, yet embraces who he is and what he does.

Pictured: Something simple and goofy that doesn't contain a lot of immediately apparent meaning and yet is impressionable enough to make you at least smirk internally 

If the descriptions of god and Satan sounded a little familiar to you just now, there's a reason for that. Slick and Monique are, at least very originally, kind of representations of god and Satan. There's no super deep literary meaning for this, it's just kind of a message of how different people will go about their lives and how it's okay to be yourself and do your own thing, even if society looks at you like a devil for it. See? That's subtle depth. That's what subtle depth looks like! REMEMBER THIS BECAUSE IT'S IMPORTANT LATER.

Also quick to note is that once again you can inspect the above strip and see that Tatsuya doesn't reuse the hills or trees in the background of the comic, nor does he reuse the clouds. Everything is uniquely drawn.

Owing to the fact that drawing a comic strip every single day of your fucking life is hard work, Sinfest quickly began to have regularly occurring 'ultra minimalist' strips, the most common of these being a strip where a character would transform into a Japanese kanji that would represent a word somehow associated with the transforming character.

Pictured: Someone's fetish, probably

Basically, this should give you an idea of what Sinfest was like. Aloof, silly, not afraid to be crass or even sexual, moments of so-dumb-it's-brilliant and fueled by a cast of memorable and colorful characters. A lot of people have called it the best webcomic of all time. Others have rebuffed that and claimed it's overrated. Personally, I don't think it was overrated at all. This was truly one of the smartest and most touching comics I've ever read.

Until the day everything changed. It was the day that Tatsuya Ishida, brilliant and talented artist, went fucking apeshit nanners. 

But before we discuss that, let's talk a little bit more about Sinfest in the year 2007. 2007 was on the cusp of a fairly major event in America. Barrack Obama was campaigning for what would become a successful bid for Presidency of the USA during the 2008 presidential election. Prior to any of this, Sinfest had remained purely non-political and had no real agenda or greater meaning to whatever it did. Tatsuya, however, started to implant politics into his work at the time. See if you can guess how he was doing it and what his message was...

Pictured: This was basically pornography for liberal high school and college kids back in 2007-2008

Yeah so basically Obama is drawn and represented as a freedom-fighting rock star type guy who could make FUCKING ANGELS materialize to jam with him as he sung songs presumably about Hope and eating carrot sticks. Some people criticized Tatsuya for getting political, even in such an aloof and silly manner. While I never agreed with any of the criticism, in hindsight, the inclusion of Obama and political themes turned out to be a very subtle turning point in Sinfest's tone.

Okay so this has all been a very, very long fucking blog post so far and it still has even longer to go. Consider this the midway point in our tale, humble reader. You may have noted that I've been dropping lots of very inconspicuous little clues and hints through the post so far that have alluded to something drastic and unfortunate befalling a webcomic I am otherwise blindly gushing in love for.

Well, you're god damned right that something befell this fucking comic.

Okay so a little bit more about me and my relationship with Sinfest. I read the shit out of it when I first discovered it ten million years ago in 2007. I kept up with it daily for years, normally reading the day's strip before school or classes or work. Then one day I just kind of stopped. For a long time. I stopped reading webcomics, stopped normally checking up on the ones I was following. Every rare once in awhile I'd remember "Oh, hey, I haven't checked up on Sinfest in a few months," and I'd go back and read whatever was new, but as the years ticked on I stopped doing even that much. Then one day about a year ago I went to check up on Sinfest after forgetting about it for a good four or five years.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I was not ready for what I found. I was not ready for what had happened. You won't be, either. No one is. No one can be. Sinfest, this once-time charming and beautiful little comic, had become warped and disfigured. Fucked up literally beyond recognition. It was still the same comic, functionally. Same characters, at least. But they were no longer the same people. They weren't the same people I'd grown to love. They were different. They were... they were...

They were shallow caricatures that served no purpose except to push the insane author's extreme agenda. Uh-oh! Woopsies! 

So maybe it sounds like I'm being a little dramatic. How could a comic go from being what I describe as the best of the best to something I am now claiming is fucked up beyond belief? The answer is that, at some point, Tatsuya went fucking insane. Like literally the guy went insane. No one seems to know exactly what caused this to happen, as the man keeps his personal life very secret and thus details are very scarce. The general consensus that I managed to dig up seemed to entail two accepted versions of what happened: Either Tatsuya had been dumped by a woman in his personal life and had turned into a raging fem-nazi over it or Tatsuya had begun dating a woman in his personal life and had turned into a raging fem-nazi over it.

Whatever the reason, the outcome is the same: Tatsuya turned into an absolutely raging fem-nazi. And no, people, don't think I'm being hyperbolic when I use the term 'fem-nazi'. Feminism is fine. Strong feelings of feminism are fine. Pushing a feminist agenda is, sure, fine. But Sinfest does none of these things. Sinfest takes it to an almost unbelievable extreme the likes of which rival Ben Garrison or Billy the Heretic-levels of inanity. Don't believe me? Let's take a look at it.

Okay so to frame this all up, this drastic tonal shift in Sinfest all began in late 2011. On October 3rd 2011, Tatsuya uploaded the strip entitled 'The Sisterhood', which is embedded here below.

Pictured: Something that is, well. It's something.

This would mark the beginning of a DRASTIC change to Sinfest that seemingly happened overnight. Remember how a lot earlier in this post I mentioned that Tatsuya obviously doesn't draw a single comic every single day but rather draws a bunch of comics all at once and then uploads one strip each day? Well, that should explain away people's confusion. Tatsuya didn't go ballistic in one day. He went poopy-crazy in between producing a batch of strips, probably over the course of a couple of months. Still, however, the tone shift is downright fucking jarring. I remember reading through the new strips of 2017 and I was expecting all this nostalgic Sinfest goodness but all I got was this weird bullshit about how men are oppressive and sex is evil and I kept thinking it was some kind of super self-aware joke BUT IT JUST KEPT GOING ON AND ON and eventually I Googled "Sinfest" further and started to find years worth of posts, articles, blogs and essays all about the bizarre twist that many agreed was basically the death of an amazing comic.

Because, at very first glance, the above strip doesn't seem to be very dangerous by itself. It's very much in line with Sinfest's style of sarcastic and satirizing humor. Pretty much every character in the strip is, outwardly, a shallow and one-dimensional caricature that represents a personality or an idea. It's only once the characters are put into Tatsuya's world and begin interacting with each other that we start to see how introspective and deep they can be. So at FIRST this strip is just normal Sinfest, only you keep reading to see what happens and eventually after about 50 bizarre strips it starts to hit you: This little girl on a tricycle isn't a self-aware caricature, this is shit that Tatsuya unironically now believes.

So Tatsuya takes his comic and turns it into a weird soapbox to preach what is basically ignorant/extremist feminist propaganda. Think I'm full of shit? Let me pull up some examples that others have collected.

Pictured: Hahahahaha oh man oh boy oh man oh man oh boy oh man

This is a strip in which Slick is picketing to 'bring back old 'Nique [Monique]'. The context behind this strip is that fans of Sinfest had been complaining about what Tatsuya had done to Monique. Essentially, in the 'Post-Sisterhood' Sinfest, Monique turns into a sexually-repressed lesbian who unironically thinks all men are shit and believes she's not allowed to be sexual anymore because women are unable to define their own sexuality, etc etc. Fans understandably didn't react well to this bizarre character assassination of a person who, prior to all of this, was actually a pretty good model for feminism. 'Pre-Sisterhood' Monique was shallow, crude and an attention-whore. But she was also smart, funny, confident, down-to-earth and secure with who she was. You know, she was complex and had a personality that ran deeper than face value. Kind of like a fucking character is supposed to be,  you know??

Post-Sisterhood Monique is stripped down from everything she used to be and is basically just a caricature who serves as a platform to bitch about men and the patriarchy. I am not making this up. When fans complained about this, Tatsuya began basically aiming attacks at them in his strips, like the one above. Slick is supposed to be a strawman in place of the comic's readers (and thus Slick himself is now reduced to a meaningless caricature who is devoid of everything he used to be). In this strip, Tatsuya is basically making the statement that everyone who wants the "Fun and cool" Monique back is, in reality, only selfishly thinking about themselves and 'their' needs (this would later be expounded upon by Tatsuya to essentially mean that people only wanted 'the sexy' Monique back, as they just wanted a sexualized porn-fodder character- at least according to Tatsuya's warped fucking view). See, because wanting a character with depth and personality over a character who is a shallow stand-in for your shitty propaganda is really selfish and misogynistic!!!   

If you think all of that makes Tatsuya sound like a petty cunt and a total bitch, well, ha ha! It gets worse!

Pictured: oh my god jesus christ i still can't believe this isn't some kind of hyper-meta aloof satire jesus kill me

In another strip, Tatsuya strawmans his ex-fans once again. This time the reader is represented as a heckler in a crowd of people that Monique is reading poetry to. The stupid, dumb, misogynistic HATER TROLL blindly insults Monique (what a sexist pig!) and claims that he's done and will be leaving, no longer listening to Monique. But Monique points out that he's not leaving and isn't going anywhere! To which the stupid dumb stupid dumb dumb stupid dumb poopy head dumbo dumb dumb butt dumb misogynist says he's giving her ONE MORE CHANCE but that's IT!

So what's going on here is Tatsuya is attacking readers who are complaining about how shallow and pointless the once lovable character of Monique has become. Tatsuya represents these complaints as a childish heckler who is "totally not going to read the comic anymore" but is clearly sticking around anyways, like a whiny child whose complaints aren't actually substantial.

Fuck you, Tatsuya. You stupid shithead. As an author, you should have way more integrity than this. Not just integrity for your readers and your critics, but also for your god damn characters. Your characters are not just tools for you to use however you want. You can not drastically change your characters on a petty whim and then get upset that people aren't on board with you. Destroy your characters and turn them into mouthpieces for your shitty, misguided propaganda if you really want, but don't you dare spit on your one-time supporters when they're unhappy with what you did. You fucking asshole.

But I mean it can't be that bad it can't get much worse I mean Tatsuya is just being a bit of a smartass right it's not THAT bad it can't be ANY worse I mean come on--

Go suck a fucking lizard dick, Tatsuya, you skunky ass bitch. This is taking Tatsuya's horseshit to a new and even more disgusting level. At least in the first two strips I've presented here, Tatsuya had the common decency to present his strawmen as belligerent, unintelligent and demanding. In THIS fucking strip the strawman is literally a softly-spoken and composed person with a concerned opinion who feels saddened that he lost the character he came to love. Because obviously, CLEARLY, you're not allowed to miss the old Monique. Nope! If you do, if you express even the slightest bit of sadness for what has become of her, then you're just a stupid honey-tongued misogynist who is really skirting around the fact you just want Monique to be sexualized again! Oh yeah, and you're a MAN! No WOMAN would ever think something so sexist or misogynistic!

Go fuck yourself, Tatsuya. You sexist dumbass.

Remember how Tatsuya harmlessly advocated for Obama? That was innocent for what it was, but Tatsuya isn't done making political commentary! Or ruining his characters while he's at it!

  

Once upon a time, Satan was a sympathetic and humanized character in Sinfest. He was a 'bad guy', but he was his own bad guy. He owned what he did and he had a thinly veiled love-hate relationship with god. Now, however, Satan is basically a woman-hating manchild (literally, his whole thing is that he hates women and wants to make them all into whores or something god I am not making this up it's terrible and it's true) and has devolved into being a stand-in to criticize Donald Trump. Satan is no longer a fun, charming ne'er-do-well cheeky asshole. Instead he's just a literal asshole and a representative for men in general. I guess. How progressive.

Slick, however, probably got the worst of all of it. First he gets turned into a woman-hating pure misogynist and then eventually goes through some stupid character arc where we learn that Slick actually has a literal demon in him who is making him into a misogynist. I am not joking. I am not kidding. Slick, the love-to-hate-him charming little fuckboy who could ultimately do no wrong is, in fact, being controlled by a woman-hating demon! The whole time! Haha! Isn't that fucking awesome?!

Slick and Monique, once quasi-romantics, basically never speak to each other anymore. They rarely even appear in the same strips together. In fact, Slick is pretty much no longer the main character. The focus is instead on Monique being a lesbian who has to live in a world of woman-hating men. Isn't that fucking awesome?!!?!?!? Lol!!!!!! 

The degeneration of Sinfest is fucking insane. A sight to truly behold. How a webcomic, a story, could go from being so deliciously deep and touching and turn into something so shallow and downright sexist and confused is just, like. What the actual fuck? It's lead many to make the insinuation that Tatsuya has always been insane, he just never had any excuse to latch onto a specific cause up until he was introduced to toxic feminism. 

I mean, daaaaaamn. Just look at this strip, featuring Squigley the pig. We see a 'Sisterhood' member beating up on a dummy that's wearing a 'Misogynist' t-shirt. Okay, sure whatever. But then Squigley asks "Why do you hate men?", to which the answer is 'men are my oppressor'. Squigley attempts to give a rebuttal, but we see he clearly can't think of one. 

Jesus Christ lol.

You want to know how Tatsuya made commentary on society and gender Pre-Sisterhood?

Look! this strip is actually fucking funny and has a point! For context, Monique has lead so many men to sin thanks to how sexual she acts that she's being compensated for her work by DevilCorp. Monique, taken aback, attempts to explain she didn't mean to make any men 'sin', she was just being open about her sexuality as a way of expressing her individuality and her freedom, yet at the same time this created a paradox, as her open sexual behavior was only reinforcing and fueling the very patriarchy she acted out against. It presents a moral conundrum for Monique and makes a commentary on sex and society as a whole. All while managing to be quirky and give you a laugh. It's fucking brilliant. 

SO WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK HAPPENED TO SINFEST.

In summary, Sinfest went from a comic with moral depth and complexity and turned into a comic where literally every single character is reduced into a shallow and one-dimensional tool in order to spew what is basically sexist propaganda. What the literal fuck?

To this very day I'm so conflicted and confused by this. Sinfest was a comic that really meant a lot to me and in its own way it still does mean a lot to me. Sinfest is like having an older brother who you looked up to and who inspired you as a child but then he started injecting crystal meth into his eye sockets until he was, literally, no longer recognizable. I no longer read the "new" Sinfest and I will never keep up with or support it ever again (unless Tatsuya makes some random, sporadic change back to how things were, I guess? Even then I dunno if I'd give Sinfest another real chance.) 

But do you know what I will do? I'll remember the old Sinfest. I will always have that, and Tatsuya can never take it away from me no matter how much the deranged asshole may want to.

FINAL POINTLESS NUMERICAL SCORE:

I really don't know. 10/10? 0/10? Unratable? Does it even fucking matter? How deep and forlorn.