A neonazi version of LotR that's ALSO somehow merged with Paradise Lost

May 23, 2024 1:31 PM

Grima Wormtongue uses DEI to convince God to let devils do a great replacement. Think about the thought process that went into this strip. [...] Grima Wormtongue, assistant to GOD, is called in front of the uh heaven senate (i assume?) to account for the great replacement of heaven, but his parents survived the HOBBIT HOLOCAUST. there is so much going on here

Back in 2022, we discussed a viral tweetstorm from "genderfluid transvestite goblin" @BitterKarella (and an accompanying write-up from Garbage Day) which recapped (with wry commentary) the bizarre history of Tatsuya Ishida's long-running webcomic Sinfest, tracing its evolution from an edgy gag-a-day strip to playful satire with colorful characters to sudden radfem agitprop to virulently transphobic screed -- an unusual insight into the TERF-to-alt-right pipeline. Two years later, she is back (on Bluesky) with an update -- and reader, it gets *so* much worse [CW: unrolled 534-post thread discussing Sinfest's hamfisted pop culture references, 4chan memes, cartoonish transphobia, conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and Esoteric Nazism (!)]. Karella also featured on the Haus of Decline podcast (90min) with recently-out trans host Alex Hood; they lament Sinfest's fall from webcomics stardom and dunk on its baffling symbology, but by the end reach a genuinely heartbreaking realization (with some evidence) that Tats may be an "egg" (or trans woman in denial) who fell in with a toxic crowd before being able to come to terms with some very deep-seated gender dysphoria.

[If you're not familiar with it, TVTropes has a great capsule summary of what Sinfest used to be and how it got to where it is today. Also, special thanks to David "retr0id" Buchanan for the nifty Bluesky thread reader that lets you load the whole thread with images in one go!]

Other podcasts discussing Karella's original deep dive: A Special Presentation, or Alf Will Not Be Seen Tonight (80 minutes) and Drawing Controversy: Bitter Karella on the Perplexing Collapse of SINFEST - Tatsuya Ishida's Once Beloved Webcomic (46 minutes, with transcript)

Sinfest on RationalWiki (which includes such subheadings as "When it was actually good" and "What the hell happened?"):

The comic started out fairly benign as a comedy strip that would sometimes poke fun at politics and religion; however, as the years went on, the strip would become infamous for having not one but two abrupt radical changes in tone. In 2011, the comic strip changed from a comedy gag strip with occasional storylines to a tract that Ishida would use to advance his views on radical feminism, with most of the comic's earlier characters moving into the background or being forgotten about. Then, in 2019, Sinfest changed to a far-right conspiracy theory-promoting webcomic that endorsed QAnon and the anti-vaccination movement, with the transphobia, which had previously only been in the background, cranked up to ten thousand; Israel's invasion of Gaza opened the door to outright anti-Semitism and Nazi-adjacent tropes. All this resulted in Sinfest receiving a reputation on par with StoneToss and Ben Garrison, which is sad, since unlike those webcomics, Sinfest actually used to be good.

The Webcomics Review recently gave up on its more sporadic observations on the strip's decline (note: reverse chronological order)

Kleefeld on Comics: On Tatsuya Ishida

This isn't the first time we've seen a comic creator slide into a headspace that seems at odds with reality. (I hesitate to call this type of behavior a mental illness; I think that can be a bit reductive and, barring a psychological examination, probably not accurate anyway.) What's interesting here is that, in most cases, the creator's work was published with enough distance between installments that it can be hard to pinpoint what might've triggered them to go down this path, but Ishida has been publishing daily for decades now. You can follow his work in real time and see precisely when/where turning points occur.

Bitter Karella actually did that, reading through the entirety of Sinfest in order in 2022 and offering commentary on Twitter. [...] She summed things up almost too succinctly with "it's not good." I would be curious, though, if a trained psychologist went through and tried to understand what exactly was going on and where things might have gone differently. As has been pointed out by others, Ishida seems to be in his early 50s now and has been working on (as far as anyone can tell) nothing but Sinfest for the the past 20+ years.

Note that Sinfest's forums are dead following multiple ideological purges; after being kicked off Patreon, it's unclear how Tats affords to continue working on the strip when it hasn't been published in print for over a dozen years.

posted by Rhaomi (75 comments total)

I used to be a daily reader of Sinfest and was increasingly baffled at the hard right turn that it took. For a while I kept thinking, this is him just goofing on the extreme attitudes these people have, right? right? Only to find that no - this is what he actually was thinking.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:46 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]

I really enjoyed Sinfest way back in the 90s when it was in the Daily Bruin at UCLA. Ishida's path to Scott Adams-like Dilbertization is especially confusing because as far as I know he isn't rich enough to be infected with the typical thin-end-of-the-wedge anti-tax brainworms.
posted by tclark at 1:47 PM on May 23 [9 favorites]

I just listened to the Haus of Decline podcast -- I am not a regular listener, but remembered (a) the dominance of Sinfest back when I was trying (and failing) to make it in webcomics with a super-hero spoof called Man-Man; and (b) the 2022 breakdown by BitterKarella, which was equal parts fascinating and horrifying.

Tats isn't alone in the webcomic-to-crank pipeline; Scott Kurtz of PVP rather famously got big, then outed himself as a giant insane asshole; I'm sure there are other examples, but none spring to mind... except MetaFilter's own plagiarism scandal from back in the day, of course.
posted by Shepherd at 1:50 PM on May 23 [8 favorites]

Man, I hate to be the guy who jumps in to say he always hated this stuff, but I remember all these terrible early '00s web comics, and I hated them then. It's like, I get it, you like Kevin Smith movies and video games and manga and no one wants to fuck you. Sarcasm is your love language. Etc. Of course these guys suck now.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 1:58 PM on May 23 [27 favorites]

Here's a journey I've made a lot recently:

"<thing>? Ooh, what's that? I haven't heard of it before now."
reads about <thing>
"... and that was a happier time."
posted by BCMagee at 2:16 PM on May 23 [10 favorites]

BitterKarella's summaries helped a lot in terms of me catching up with Sinfest, which I dropped sometime in the aughts because it was in the well-drawn-but-not-that-well-written quadrant of webcomics. (Ditto for Scott Kurtz, although he was pretty personally unbearable well before Ishida.) I followed along for a bit via the reposts on r/sinfest, but had to bow out not only because of the regular hatefest but also because Ishida has simply stopped trying and keeps repeating the same "jokes" over and over again. I'm frankly mystified as to why he even bothers.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:41 PM on May 23 [3 favorites]

I enjoyed some aspects of Sinfest back when I was reading it shortly after the turn of the century, most notably the little three panel comics where one of the characters would transform into a calligraphic version of a kanji as the sort of punchline.

i fell away from it and most other webcomics once i hit my 30s, but finding about sinfest a few years back (again, from bitter karella, who also does the absolutely wonderful midnight society bits) was definitely a moment of, "what the hell?!"

as far as ishida being a rotten egg... i mean, i think the possibility is there but at this point given that their work is basically slightly better drawn stonetoss they might well have crossed the moral event horizon. i don't think they'd ever be able to come out without a major and possibly self-destructive disastrous canon event, and even then...
posted by i used to be someone else at 2:45 PM on May 23 [3 favorites]

They totally Naomi Wolfed.
posted by CynicalKnight at 2:53 PM on May 23 [8 favorites]

The theory feels too perfect, but lots of too perfect things happen in this world.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:16 PM on May 23

Every generation gets the Dave Sim most appropriate to its age.
posted by JHarris at 3:18 PM on May 23 [49 favorites]

I'd never heard of this webcomic, and wow, do I wish I still didn't know about it. Like, not only is tats' ideology totally abhorrent and disgusting, but their writing is lazy and nonsensical. 0/10, would not read again.
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:27 PM on May 23 [7 favorites]

I recently decided to check in, clicked back through a few, and discovered that Tats has been depicting Jonathan Greenblatt as a Count Orlok-looking vampire, including one in which he sings "I can't make you love me, so I'm putting you in jail" which is captioned "crying out as he hits you". That's the kind of slogan only Nazis and antifascists know about, and he's been pretty clear which side he's on.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:38 PM on May 23 [3 favorites]

I'm curious, how much is publicly known about Tatsuya Ishida these days? Back in the day he was kind of a mystery, I remember, no photos of him or anything.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:40 PM on May 23

Ishida's colors are so fucking pretty nowadays, he's really mastered a look there. It's a shame the narratives are so fucked up that it makes the art just about worthless.
posted by egypturnash at 3:41 PM on May 23 [7 favorites]

regular reader from way back here, dropped off a few years ago starting to be a bit uncertain if it was reaaaalllyyyy satire, took a look at the mega thread of 2022+ and .... hooolllyyy shit god damn. cut out after the big sunday "woke school" section because just viscerally repellent

I do have to say that pot smokin' Squigley's nonchalance about the gender transformation zone was kind of great, though, not exactly formative, but like, yeah, it really is no big deal. I could absorb that.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:52 PM on May 23 [3 favorites]

I hear you kittens for breakfast, I too bounced off of Sinfest back in the day, it was a little too sarcastic and nihilistic, even when it was supposedly good. I didn't get into Goats either for that reason.

I don't intend to keep leaving these remembrance stones for oneswellfoop in every webcomic thread, but he would be here writing full-page comments on the history of the medium were he still around. I don't know if I'll ever stop missing him.
posted by JHarris at 3:57 PM on May 23 [32 favorites]

Wow, I read that whole long unrolled 534-post thread. I used to read Sinfest and enjoy it and, just wow.

Reminds me a lot of how I knew (both IRL and online) a really funny guy in the late 90s from my alumni crowd who got into warblogging, fell in with the Little Green Footballs crowd as they went hard right, and was cheering on the death of Rachel Corrie later. Especially freaky as a comparison given how Sinfest has gone so far into antisemitism.

I feel like there's something to be said about the parasocial relationships readers develop with the strip and the characters in here but I'm still too busy boggling from what I just read to express it in coherent form.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 4:00 PM on May 23 [3 favorites]

This was completely new to me. Got about 10% of the way through that unrolled thread and honestly had a real hard time caring about much. I do like the art style.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:13 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]

My history with Sinfest is stumbling on it, liking the art, reading a bit, not being too captivated, lather, rinse, repeat, wait what. OMG! this person has gone off the deep end! Now, I get to come back and say, the creator has gone off the deep end, swum out to the edge of the continental shelf and gone off that. It's sad, but... yeesh. I feel like I need a shower. Maybe two.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:17 PM on May 23 [4 favorites]

On the other side of the equation, I still read Penny Arcade. And I know some people here think that The Dickwolves was the breaking point but the writer half of that duo at least has certainly taken on what seems to be an anti-capitalist, pro-BLM, anti-fascist bent.

It's honestly one of the more refreshing things I still bother to read post-2020.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 4:24 PM on May 23 [8 favorites]

wait what apparently Ishida had a stint as penciller for a 1996 GI Joe comic at Dark Horse, the tagline for these was "EXTREME TIMES CALL FOR EXTREME HEROS", as well as some Godzilla stuff for them.
posted by egypturnash at 4:39 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]

I'm only about 1/20th through the way of the unrolled thread and it's already scaring the shit out of me. Like this person might not be okay with just letting this violence out on the page. I am sure I'm overreacting, but this is like manifesto-level.
posted by queensissy at 4:42 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]

EXTREME TIMES CALL FOR EXTREME HEROS"

The 90s were, if nothing else, eXtreme
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 4:43 PM on May 23 [5 favorites]

outgrown_hobnail: "This was completely new to me. Got about 10% of the way through that unrolled thread and honestly had a real hard time caring about much. I do like the art style."

I suppose that it will be more inherently interesting to people who were fans back in the day (and even Karella talks about how boring and repetitive it gets a few times). But one thing that makes it worth being aware of, even if you're ignorant or appalled by it, is that Tats has a track record of being an early adopter of far-right ideology before it hits the conservative mainstream. If marinating in the alt-tech incubator has led him to torch his reputation and embrace literal no-shit Thule Society/Hyperborean Nazism, that's an ominous sign of where that whole zeitgeist is going. (See also the mingling of out-and-proud Nazis unopposed on the floor of this year's CPAC, or that Trump campaign video touting "a unified reich".)
posted by Rhaomi at 4:46 PM on May 23 [5 favorites]

the strips covered in that thread seem to be so low-effort, writing-wise, that it's hard to believe they're reflective of any actual ideology. i know it's possible for people to have internally inconsistent beliefs, but to this extent? it's actually impossible to tell what's parody -- either lighthearted parody/exaggeration of his own beliefs or lazy parody of his ideological opponents'. there's no sense to it. the thread writer has made a valiant attempt to deduce the outlines of his worldview from his comics but i'm not convinced there is one.

so why would someone write these weirdly political yet incomprehensible comics? too much effort spent on good art to bother with good writing?

i'm inclined to guess that it might be a form of audience capture instead (i.e. driven by what the creator thinks the audience wants, rather than what the creator wants to express personally) but that would imply he has an audience, and like... who's reading sinfest??
posted by a flock of goslings at 5:03 PM on May 23 [1 favorite]

You know what I miss about the Sinfest I used to read? That cute, gentle romance between the little Christian dude and the demon girl. If I remember it right, that was about the same time when it was starting to turn, in hindsight.
posted by KChasm at 5:16 PM on May 23 [5 favorites]

I read Sinfest back in the day and check in on the subreddit every year or so.

It's safe to say that Tats wears his heart on his sleeve and is not subtle at all. My theory has always been that he had a pornography addiction that made him horny and self-loathing. He dealt with it initially by going radfem (his brand of feminism was always weird and nonsensical, so naturally he became a terf) and adopting the ethos of "men are monsters that women need to be protected from." This of course is it's own form of benevolent sexism, but it gave him an excuse to keep drawing Maxim Magazine-esque women in his comics to supplant his stripper fetish.

(Reading that last paragraph is bonkers, but it has a lot of explanatory power if you followed his comic over the years.)

I really don't think he's trans. He just keeps pivoting down the incel pipeline into anti-vax, antisemitic conspiracy theories, fundamentalist Christianity, Nazi-ism, and believes that... well, it's really hard to describe what he believes on any given day. Tats' entire identity and politics at this point are just pure, undiluted reaction and obsession.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:20 PM on May 23 [8 favorites]

I initially read that as "EXTREME TIMES CALL FOR EXTREME HETEROS."
posted by abraxasaxarba at 6:12 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]

aw man, this is reminding me that i'm still sad about dave sim, why you gotta be this way, comics dudes
posted by phooky at 6:16 PM on May 23 [10 favorites]

I'm curious, how much is publicly known about Tatsuya Ishida these days? Back in the day he was kind of a mystery, I remember, no photos of him or anything.

Pretty little. The subreddit noted that he went to UCLA in the early nineties (and did a version of Sinfest for the campus newspaper); they also posted some stuff from his high school years, including some stuff from the yearbook that showed an early form of Slick, his version of Milo Bloom from Bloom County and assumed author insert. At one point, in an autobiographical piece, he mentions that he worked on some mainstream comics in the nineties, but kind of torched his career there both by plagiarizing some content and by blowing deadlines. Ironically, one of the last people known to have seen him (at least that talks about it publicly) is fellow webcartoonist Mae Dean, who came out as trans a few years ago, and who depicted Ishida at a webcartoonist meetup [CW: deadnaming in original version of comics]. AFAIK, Ishida has thus been out of public sight for nearly 20 years, not counting him portraying himself in a few scattered strips.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:18 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]

… what the hell

I read Sinfest back in the early days, but every time I got a new computer I’d lose my bookmarks and various comics would drop away. It’s so weird seeing what happened, I’m not that surprised but I am disappointed.

Also if anyone remembers the brilliant early 2000’s webcomic Return to Sender its author went into animation and writes YA graphic novels and children’s picture books now. I just finished Plain Jane and the Mermaid by her, which was delightful.
posted by lepus at 6:19 PM on May 23 [4 favorites]

Why make an excuse for them? Maybe Ishida is just an unforgivable jackass. It’s an altogether simpler explanation.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:20 PM on May 23 [4 favorites]

In general, for links to a lot of other Sinfest related info, the pinned page from the r/sinfest subreddit.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:22 PM on May 23

On the other side of the equation, I still read Penny Arcade. And I know some people here think that The Dickwolves was the breaking point but the writer half of that duo at least has certainly taken on what seems to be an anti-capitalist, pro-BLM, anti-fascist bent.

He was also recently on the Haus of Decline podcast, talking, among other things, about his trans daughter. I haven't finished the episode but I get the impression he's matured a lot in the last decade.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:10 PM on May 23 [8 favorites]

Just as an FYI/PSA, the "egg" language is solidly in the "language cis people shouldn't use" category. It's quite arguably inappropriate to use about anyone but oneself and some people find the whole egg discourse problematic.
posted by hoyland at 8:18 PM on May 23 [24 favorites]

Alas. I was heavily entrenched in the webcomics culture of the late nineties and early aughts. My longtime companion and bestie was a mod on the keenspot IRC server I practically lived in back in the day; metafilter was linked to me there and some longtime mefites are my only other remaining connection to that subculture. But it was formative, and my late highschool and early college years are all anchored around my positive yet sometimes cringey memories of meeting webcomics people, going to cons and frequenting artists alleys, hanging out with people who knew people who drew a comic that was mostly known to UCLA students pre-eternal September… honestly I was super lucky to fall in to the crowd I did when I did! Most of them were absolute mensches and the ones who weren’t were carefully (and in retrospect not very subtly) steered away from me.

Through it all I was a daily reader of Sinfest. Compared to the wacky experimental and deeply queer webcomics I gravitated towards, like When I Am King and Bruno, Sinfest felt like reading the daily funnies in the newspaper, but like, a little edgy. Whenever I brought it up with my people I would get eyerolls and scoffs usually, or the occasional sensible chuckle. But then when Keenspot dried up and webcomics as a subculture kind of moved on, Sinfest remained one of the few comics I read all of, for years. I would forget about it for a while and then come back to read it in chunks of a week or month at a time, but it still lingered in my old imported bookmarks next to Diesel Sweeties and Dinosaur Comics. It might even be in some sub folder of a sub folder today! I haven’t checked. It’s now been years since I read Sinfest but it’s probably been way fewer years than most people who used to like it.

It was always a little… off. The art was usually wonderful, and sometimes he would go all-in and make something that evoked a Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip or a gorgeous two page Bone spread or something. I was in art school and my best friends growing up were always drawing comics and one of them is even a professional animator and storyboarder now, so I really appreciated Sinfest on its artistic merits. I was envious of his grasp of stylization, how he could make cute characters have so much expression. But slowly and surely, the content went from edgy goofiness to something I’d pick up at a comic shop, scan, and put back on the shelf. I think the last time I looked at it was 2016 or so, for obvious historical reasons.

I hope that he can use his art to help himself, some day. When you have a talent that you have honed into an incredible skill over so many years, it sucks when it’s wrapped up with such poisonous ideology. You have to unravel one from the other. I hope some of the experimental and supportive spirit I felt online in webcomics in 2001 is still in him and he can change. I’m not holding my breath.
posted by Mizu at 8:29 PM on May 23 [13 favorites]

man, Sinfest. I mean, I gotta say, if I were forced to choose to read a comic strip written by someone who has gradually lost any and all grasp on shared objective reality and turned irrevocably into Uncle Facebook, well, at least it has more competent art than Dilbert
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:33 PM on May 23 [4 favorites]

some people find the whole egg discourse problematic.

I’m sure there must be a long German word for the experience of learning something exists while simultaneously finding out it is problematic. I’ve now had it a couple times in this thread.
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:34 PM on May 23 [7 favorites]

I remember Sinfest was one of the regulars my friends all read along with Sluggy Freelance, Sexy Losers, PvP, that one with the dust ball character, and a couple others. My ex really liked Sinfest but I always felt it was kinda... Off. Feeling vindicated.
posted by The otter lady at 9:20 PM on May 23 [6 favorites]

I can't really add anything that hasn't been said. Like most people of my generation, I used to read Sinfest. It was pretty and funny and cool. And at some point it stopped being funny and started being a lonely guy who was increasingly afraid of everything, and unable to find anything he truly believed was good. But it's still pretty, so there's still that minute hope that surely, surely it will regain those other quantities someday.
posted by one for the books at 9:30 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]

Hi, long time lurker finally inspired to sign up just to say this thread is blowing my mind.

I was really into webcomics in the early-mid 00s. I had aspirations of making my own, but alas I was not motivated enough and too shy to join and reap the benefits of the surrounding community. For the most part I stopped reading them after high school, although I still was/am somewhat familiar with Penny Arcade, as I am an on and off attender of their PAX convention.

I never read Sinfest but it was hard not to be aware at the time; there were ads everywhere and seemingly respected by many. It is truly awful the road he headed down and not too surprising, based on what little I knew about the comic. Although the degree of it is really shocking.

But what others have brought up about webcomics and their authors have been fascinating to read. Shame to hear about Kurtz, I read and enjoyed PVP for a while. Learning about Mae Dean reminded me how much I really enjoyed Real Life Comics. lepus mentioning Return to Sender was the real revelation! I hadn't thought about that comc in at least two decades, but I can still remember the look of the characters. I don't think I ever saw it resolved, though I was very interested. I went to look up her work and realized that I had managed to read one of her books unintentionally last year!

This was a very fascinating thread, thank you. It's a shame it's attached to something so horrible. If someone tells me that Pete Abrams or Howard Tayler have turned into garbage, I'm going to cry a river.
posted by ersatzsapience at 11:04 PM on May 23 [21 favorites]

I read Sinfest for nearly a decade (dropped out soon into the Sisterhood) and yeah, the gender stuff was what drew me in. Very much not-cis and exploratory in a way that mirrored some of my own thoughts at the time, and I really wonder if there's a timeline where Tatsuya ended up happier after some revelations.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:08 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]

Hey ersatzpience, welcome! Congratulations on getting an account!
posted by JHarris at 12:02 AM on May 24 [12 favorites]

I remember Sinfest as being kind of light cute fun when I was in high school in the early 2000s; it played a bigger role in my life than it really deserved because it was just counterculture enough to attract my interest without scaring me away as a sheltered kid marinating in the shitty post-9/11 don't-rock-the-boat conservative authoritarianism of my rural/exurban school district. I dropped it pretty soon after starting college because I found it dull and repetitive, especially after I discovered better much better webcomics Achewood and later Gunnerkrigg Court. Sad to see the author's heel turn and subsequent journey up his own ass.
posted by nanny's striped stocking at 12:48 AM on May 24 [3 favorites]

I knew about Sinfest from a friend who read it circa 2005 but forgot about it up until two years ago, when the full understanding of what had happened was revealed to me in the Metafilter thread. Since then, due to grotesque fascination, I've been subscribed to r/sinfest (which universally critical of Tatsuya).

Ishida is the very embodiment of someone trapped in a pipeline. I'm not just talking about the very specific alt-right pipeline here. He will dabble with an idea, then fully commit, then make it an obsession. TERFdom was like this, but then, anti-vax ideology, groomer panic, great replacement, and now antisemitism. I remember when only a few years ago there were veiled references to Jews, but then they become more frequent, and now it's every comic strip. It also has some very inside-baseball Nazi dog whistles (e.g. "The Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you"), so Ishida must be reading something, he must be getting this from somewhere. Since he's such a private persona (and yet makes a comic every. day.) I'm most curious about this. What does a person read/watch to make them an obsessive antisemite in a few years? How does that happen? It's sad but fascinating case study that I'm sure of which we won't really get to the bottom until one day Ishida stops posting, probably due to him dying.
posted by Lord Chancellor at 4:05 AM on May 24 [5 favorites]

that one with the dust ball character

Assuming this isn’t an intentional circumlocution, this would be User Friendly, which, as obliquely mentioned earlier, had a Metafilter-centered plagiarism scandal in the late 2000s.
posted by zamboni at 4:43 AM on May 24 [2 favorites]

I still read Penny Arcade. And I know some people here think that The Dickwolves was the breaking point but the writer half of that duo at least has certainly taken on what seems to be an anti-capitalist, pro-BLM, anti-fascist bent.

I mean, they realized they’d crossed a line with edgelord humor and published something stupidly misogynistic and deeply hurtful, got taken to task, publicly apologized and… got better. That is what’s supposed to happen. I posted equally heinous shit to this site in the early 00s. Best is to never be that person in the first place, but failing that the only right answer is to own up to your mistakes and become a better one. I continued reading them for a couple years after that not because I thought the callout was wrong, but because I felt the social media drubbing continued on and on months after they apologized and steadily grew way harsher than was warranted. For some reason a bunch of people on Twitter/Gawker got weirdly competitive about who could say It’s Completely Trash Forever in the cruelest way possible, and it just felt like such a performative, shitty clickbait overreaction. There was a distinct vibe that several Extremely Online People had been waiting to go after PA for years, and it kinda sucked.

Personally I was a fan from the first four comics published on Loonyboi’s Rag, which I regularly read at the time (there just weren’t as many options in the days of Blue’s News, Planetquake, Shacknews and Dear Mynx - reading literally everything available was easy). I was 16 and desperate to try and find a cultural place to land as my fundie evangelical upbringing began to slip away, and something about the sense of normalcy as gamer adults that they projected really helped.

I’ve met them a couple times; the very first IRL PA meetup at Lanwerx in Bellevue before PAX became a thing, and again when they toured Irrational’s offices right around the Bioshock Infinite release. Mentioning Loonyboi during that visit prompted a shocked “holy shit, you’re like a real OG fan” reaction. For no particular reason I can point to that was also around when I stopped reading, so I’m happy to learn they’re continuing to do well.

Circling back on topic: I haven’t read Sinfest since the first three years, but it never clicked with me. Something always felt slightly …off about it, even in my edgy Internet shitlord days. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on but consistently rang tiny, muted alarm bells in the back of my head. Discovering how that turned out is even more “well that figures” than reading about Penny Arcade following through on getting better.

Actual surprises? I honestly thought for years that Joey Comeau was going to take his own life, especially after reading Overqualified. Some of those chapters felt like they were typed out with one hand while the other was sharpening the knife, and I sort of expected to wake up to very sad news one morning. Dave Willis really turned a corner and moved past his fundie upbringing - much slower and with more struggle than I did, but I love how thoroughly he’s documented and deconstructed that experience over the past decade of his comics. Everything he writes now is palpably the end product of deep introspection, slow healing and incredibly horny Internet fandom culture. It’s the best. Jeph Jaques managed to restabilize and regain his footing after his divorce, went even harder left and tackled a major Culture Fandom side project (Iain Banks is similarly my political North Star, alongside Metafilter). I lost track of Chris Hastings after he springboarded from Doctor McNinja to writing Deadpool, but: props. Ending on a downer note: I had understood on some level that Achewood wasn’t sustainable, but I honestly thought it would go out better than it did. I know Onstad’s started again on Patreon but I’m almost afraid to look.

These days I’m down to just Dumbing of Age, Questionable Content and the soon-to-be-concluding Kill Six Billion Demons. Occasional SMBC binges. All remain wonderful.
posted by Ryvar at 5:27 AM on May 24 [8 favorites]

Every generation gets the Dave Sim most appropriate to its age.

Jesus that comment stings *and* makes me feel really fucking old.

I read the whole unrolled bsky thread and yeah, the Dave Sim parallel is very apt as we got to see his psyche fracture and crumble through the letters columns each month, but only if you were paying attention and not only tuning in for the cutesy aardvark (Squigley, is that you?). I'm also quite worried for the impact this has had on BitterKarella.

All of that said, the visual references and cues in this one strip could be an article in itself.
posted by Molesome at 5:38 AM on May 24 [5 favorites]

I was going to skip this until I saw it was about Sinfest. I still have some of the strips saved to my computer from when it was readable. Man did it go bad quickly though.

Sigh. Time to read the links.
posted by Wilbefort at 5:59 AM on May 24 [1 favorite]

Like others here, I was a reader in the earlier days. It fit that edgy, "AZN" thing that I guess I was into at the time. I took it on faith that Tats was an Asian-American of roughly the same age as me and so some of what he did definitely resonated. Over time it just stopped working for me. I know I saw the original Sisterhood storyline but I was definitely not a regular reader by then.
posted by LostInUbe at 6:48 AM on May 24

Best is to never be that person in the first place, but failing that the only right answer is to own up to your mistakes and become a better one.

Said it before, I'll say it again: I am super-happy that social media didn't exist (if you don't count random BBSes) when I was younger.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:25 AM on May 24 [6 favorites]

Sinfest and Boondocks were the two webcomics that I'd read back in the day.

Please don't tell me that the Boondocks guy has gone off the rails, too. I know they got a TV series, and I enjoyed watching it, too, but that don't guarantee nothin'...
posted by clawsoon at 8:55 AM on May 24 [1 favorite]

It's weird cause I can't help still feeling a certain alignment between the Tatsuya Ishida of the early 2000s and myself of that same period. Similar taste in art and media. Similar interests and hangups. Aspirations to a career in illustration. And so I took it (along with a bunch of other stuff that hasn't aged well) as a bit of a personality marker at the time. How I wound up a generally well adjusted adult in the world and he wound up an internet crank goblin is a mystery to me, and honestly makes me kind of nervous. What bullet did I dodge exactly, and is it still out there waiting for me? I hope the big difference is that the artist in question is just fundamentally kind of an asshole and I'm not. I guess I have to hope that just worrying about going down that road is a bit of an inoculation.

I find myself going back and forth on the question of whether Sinfest is worthy of this depth of analysis. Its thoughts and opinions are lazy garbage, so I'm tempted to say it's unworthy of this much time and attention, but it also represents a long-term running illustration of the unfiltered id of a reactionary doofus, and is maybe a weirdly important document in that way? I don't know but I've been thinking about it kind of a lot since I saw this post yesterday.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 11:33 AM on May 24 [2 favorites]

Hey, I just realized that Help Desk is still publishing! 28 years old now, and I don't think the author has become a Nazi, given the latest available is disapproving of Nazis.

Wait, that means I am 28(!) years OLDER than I was. Oh dear. Well, back to wrestling with UberSoft 365.
posted by jb at 12:24 PM on May 24 [2 favorites]

If I had to guess what drove tats mad it would be reading the comments on his strips and pandering to the majority to get more ego boost. For decades now.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:29 PM on May 24

Sinfest was one of my daily webcomic reads for years. At some point I remember feeling more and more confused about what the target of his humour had actually become, but kept reading it out of habit . That must have been around the time when he was in the middle of his first big ideological shift because I recall stumbling across some criticism of him and had a profound "magic eye" picture experience where a bunch of noise I had been perceiving suddenly resolved into something I found disgusting. I had felt sad about other web comics that had ended and would no longer be part of a positive routine but remember being angry that all of those years of previous enjoyment were taken from me.

The PA snafu put me on alert, but as others said, I did not see any further sign of the same problem, so I continue to read it, SMBC, Oglaf (nsfw) and XKCD as my regular web-comics. I'm really glad that Munroe and Weinersmith have successfully applied their talents a bit further afield. Each have an energy that I first found in Douglas Adams, while I was a child, of people who make sharp, sarcastic and humorous criticism of humanity while also expressing their love and admiration for it. I've always needed that to help make sense of the world and avoid getting sucked into the dark.
posted by WaylandSmith at 12:44 PM on May 24 [6 favorites]

seanmpuckett: "If I had to guess what drove tats mad it would be reading the comments on his strips and pandering to the majority to get more ego boost. For decades now."

This seems... unlikely, given the massively disruptive tonal and ideological shifts. In the early days of the radfem era he made a point of fucking with fans who missed the old comic, making mocking strips about them and replacing the old forum wholesale. This took a big chunk out of his audience, and needless to say, the people left were not exactly a hotbed of far-right neonazi sentiment. His transitioning to that anyway in the last few years further cratered his audience (even among the TERF diehards in the purged forum) and steadily eroded his Patreon support until he lost it completely.

Tats is a lot of things, but he's not somebody who panders to what his readers want (even when it's something as simple as "having a coherent plotline" or "respecting the basic dignity of all human beings").
posted by Rhaomi at 1:12 PM on May 24 [2 favorites]

I find myself going back and forth on the question of whether Sinfest is worthy of this depth of analysis.

It depends why. To know what happened? I don’t think anyone, even he, could say for sure. To warn people off? No, you can show them a strip or two and say “see? Nazi.” The one place it’s worth doing is because this is a 20 year record of one person’s radicalization, and how you go from sex negativity through transphobia to Nazi talking points. That could be useful, if only to convince some doubters what so many already know.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:17 PM on May 24 [6 favorites]

I'm tempted to say it's unworthy of this much time and attention, but it also represents a long-term running illustration of the unfiltered id of a reactionary doofus, and is maybe a weirdly important document in that way

As someone who listened to Knowledge Fight episodes all day at work today, this made me grin.
posted by AdamCSnider at 2:44 PM on May 24 [2 favorites]

Assuming this isn’t an intentional circumlocution, this would be User Friendly, which, as obliquely mentioned earlier, had a Metafilter-centered plagiarism scandal in the late 2000s.

User Friendly is the only web comic I read (well, Boondocks is mentioned above, but that was in the paper for me) and I'm suddenly very sad to find it's gone, even though I don't think I've thought about it in at least fifteen years.
posted by hoyland at 7:52 PM on May 24

Pretty much the only webcomic I still visit is Order of the Stick. Oh, and Oglaf I guess.
posted by inpHilltr8r at 2:14 AM on May 25 [4 favorites]

So have people got to the point where Tats reveals he believes in conspiracy theories about CERN and the Large Hadron Collider? And that children are having adrenochrome harvested from their blood?
posted by AlSweigart at 6:43 AM on May 25 [1 favorite]

So have people got to the point where Tats reveals he believes in conspiracy theories about CERN and the Large Hadron Collider? And that children are having adrenochrome harvested from their blood?

TBH I mostly skimmed the catch-up thread. As someone who did read Sinfest back in the day I am interested in what the hell happened, but I'd rather let someone more qualified analyze the content. It is dire, and despite all the signifiers slathered over it, often obscure.
posted by mscibing at 7:52 AM on May 25 [1 favorite]

The retro-read thread was an eye opener. I listened to much of the podcast detailing that history. Kind of amazing how much I've missed in the last ~15 years.

In the 2000s I liked the strip. I had it in my RSS reader. I don't recall whether the feed was official or fan-made.

Aside: It seems there was a vogue for turning newspaper strips or web strips into things which were delivered by RSS. It was amazing to find good webcomics and have them deposited in my reader, these were the days before the infinite doomscroll. I could assemble an inbox of news and commentary just for myself.

I enjoyed the strip when it engaged with religion: appreciating the loveliness of them, poking fun at their inconsistencies and differences across belief systems.

It's disorienting trying to reconcile that with the hateful misogyny, anti-semitism, Nazism. The tragedy is that it seems there might have been other pathways for this creator. It didn't have to go bad, did it? Or at least, I certainly don't want to think of this descent as inevitable.

I remembered that I had highlighted a few strips on my website years ago. Before I went looking I feared I'd find I blogged strips with hints of nastiness and hate. What I found instead was what appealed to me then (2006-2008) still pretty much appeals to me now. I was hoping and yet dreading some insight but found none.

Internet Archive links to these bookmarked strips. God's Got Skills, I guess that covers it, Cheer up, Jesusman & Buddha Boy, What a guy!, Little Taiko Boy.
posted by artlung at 9:02 AM on May 25 [5 favorites]

2 days later, and I'm still watching that bluesky thread-unroller update.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 9:52 AM on May 25 [4 favorites]

rum-soaked space hobo: Karella's ongoing deep dive on this has been AMAZING. Did you see his previous (2022) megathread? It's on Twitter, linked toward the beginning of her bsky thread.
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:05 PM on May 25

I spent this morning with the new Bluesky thread and now I've checked today's strip, and guys, we can pack and go home. He's gone.
posted by sukeban at 8:46 AM on May 26 [4 favorites]

sukeban, I saw that one too and honestly even having read the whole Bsky thread and listened to the Haus of Decline episode I was not prepared.

This is all very distressing.
posted by Suedeltica at 9:32 AM on May 26 [2 favorites]

I have to

As a wise shitposter once said, you don’t actually gotta hand it to them.
posted by zamboni at 10:07 AM on May 26 [6 favorites]

recognizing… acknowledge

praise

I see these as different things.
posted by zamboni at 4:26 PM on May 26

artlung: "I remembered that I had highlighted a few strips on my website years ago. Before I went looking I feared I'd find I blogged strips with hints of nastiness and hate. What I found instead was what appealed to me then (2006-2008) still pretty much appeals to me now. I was hoping and yet dreading some insight but found none.

Internet Archive links to these bookmarked strips. God's Got Skills, I guess that covers it, Cheer up, Jesusman & Buddha Boy, What a guy!, Little Taiko Boy."

sukeban: "I spent this morning with the new Bluesky thread and now I've checked today's strip, and guys, we can pack and go home. He's gone."

Jesus. I was a semi-regular reader through ~2012, but after being ignorant of it for the next decade the only engagement I had with it from that point was through gawking at it as filtered through Twitter commentary and the unofficial sub that hates him. But to see these old, charming, whimsical, joy-filled strips, contrasted so directly with straight-up Holocaust denial and... it's hard to believe it's even the same person.

I guess the one saving grace of his tailspin is how he's largely forgotten his old characters in favor of symbolic tableaus -- we've already seen Slick spout some anti-semitism but I don't think I could bear seeing old favorites like Criminy or Percy and Pooch spouting literal Hitler-did-nothing-wrong propaganda.
posted by Rhaomi at 5:38 PM on May 26 [5 favorites]

First of all, I don't know what's in the "it's over: he's gone" strip because it seems to be behind some kind of account-based login filter for age limit reasons on reddit, which I have always avoided. I'm not sure I care enough to dig deeper, but just know that this is going to be a big context gap for a lot of folks stumbling over this thread in future.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 7:54 AM on May 28

FYI you can just go to the main sinfest site (not linking just search for it if you need to know) and check it out there. The "he's gone" comment seems to reference the big panel from May 26 2024 where a pair of "They Live" goggles reveal a different view of WW2. It's gross, don't go look at it if you don't want to just say "he's gone" yourself. There's clearly nothing left in Tats' head but garbage.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:09 AM on May 28 [1 favorite]

Here's the direct image link; personally I don't ever link to the site itself to avoid giving him even a modicum of traffic.
posted by Rhaomi at 8:25 AM on May 28

Holy (and I do not say this lightly) fucking shit.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:30 AM on May 28