D’you think it’s time to take Sinfest down from comic links, due to things like this week’s plotline about how trans women are pedophiles and seeing a mother breastfeed a baby drives them insane with envy ‘cuz it reminds them of how they’re fake so they buy a baby and obnoxiously have the baby suck on their nipple in front of the mom to show up the mom and they’re getting off on it and they get a boner and the woke emergency services won’t do anything about it so the only thing that can stop trans women abusing children are righteous all-american men with guns who say trans women are zombies since deciding your enemy is not human always goes great?
Its current fans might say I’m doing this for woke ideological purity, but I’m more concerned about holy FECK.
Ernesto
Awful. I stopped reading that comic years ago because of the levels of hate it contained.
Xerxes Aragon
Same here. The early years of Sinfest were fun to read. When it turned into a radical feminist misandrist diatribe I deleted it from my comic links.
Gus
Yeah, Tatsuya went off the rails years ago. I haven’t thought about that comic in ages.
Nomi
I have never heard of this comic and am sorry to learn it exists.
Thank you, @Fish. Yeah. Taken down. I knew he’d gone far right a while ago, but didn’t remember I had a link up to his more-and-more intolerant work.
I should look at my links again someday, I probably built that list about a decade ago. Half the links are probably dead.
Thorfinntk
Well, I see only five where I know the website to be gone (Marooned, Anders loves Maria, Finn and Charlie, Kinokofry and Templar, AZ) – but I do count to 30 that either have finished or gone without updates for a year or more
Pete Rogan
I’ve followed Tatsuya Ishida’s “Sinfest” since it first went public about twenty-three years ago. It could be a little abstruse in its sexist treatment of female characters, which was puzzling until I read of the murder spree of Elliott Rodgers and determined that, like Rodgers, Ishida was himself an incel — or ‘involuntary celibate,’ an auto-isolating social deviant with rather self-centered and hostile ideas about how human sexuality works and why they are, to their minds, deliberately excluded from participating. This made the psychology of his characters and the rather bizarre behavior of the leads comprehensible.
The entire comic’s focus and relationship with its characters changed dramatically in 2016, with a decidedly political angle intruding where it hadn’t been before. Over time, virtually the entire cast has been replaced by short-lived parodies of one type of social ‘deviant’ or another, until the entire comic set itself firmly against the very idea of transsexuals and the notion, very plainly obscene to Ishida, that these should be treated as if they were people. They plainly are not, in “Sinfest.” They’re singularly, defiantly perverse, openly and aggressively pedophilic, and he has portrayed male-to-female trans people as husky men, often with beards, whose crotches bulge considerably more than any other male character’s. They are also dedicated to the sexual mutilation of children — it goes without saying that only male children could be mutilated the way Ishida imagines it. This would all be merely deeply embarrassing if it were not overtly hostile and plainly an incitement to violence.
It didn’t help that other political elements appeared that made it clear Ishida fully subscribes to the Q panoply of misinformation, conspiracythink, and open hostility to democracy. It got bad enough that, early this year, Patreon kicked him off their site, and he’s had to go to right-wing sites to try and sell cartoons and restore his considerably-reduced income.
I still follow the comic because the entire downward trend of Ishida’s work — his exaggerated hostile parodies, depicting Joe Biden as a sort of transsexual-pedophilic Two-Face from the Batman comic and movies, and more and more his use of exaggerated clashing colors, brings to mind the descent into madness of another once-harmless artist and cartoonist, Louis Wain. In the late 19th Century Wain was famous for his anthropomorphized cats and kittens, and his short-lived venture into cartooning. Later in his career his work changed in style and presentation; he began to depict cats as increasingly geometric forms (a later generation would recognize elements of fractal construction in them) and used increasingly dramatic and non-organic colors in his works. His later works scarcely resemble cats at all, and of course by this time he was not merely unproductive but institutionalized. He wasn’t particularly physically dangerous but, as his art showed, he was plainly quite mad. Tatsuya Ishida is showing the same tendencies, right down to the distortions of his older, pre-2016 characters, and his use of exaggerated colors.
I believe we are watching the public deterioration and mental breakdown of a Web cartoonist, something I can’t recall seeing anywhere else. It may be unprecedented in modern times and it is certainly not complete yet. Ishida has hinted that he expects 2024 to be a year shaken by extreme political violence, and the restoration of Donald Trump to the Iron Throne of America, not necessarily by voting. All this from a man who once depicted the Devil as an unsuccessful con man and God as a set of hand puppets in the clouds. God, the Devil, and even the calm Buddha and Dragon have disappeared from his work now. This week he has a jealous ‘trans’ man buying a baby to ‘nurse’ it in front of a ‘normal’ breastfeeding woman to taunt her, and the readership. I think it’s safe to say that Tatsuya Ishida no longer possesses his senses, and is proud to show that we are all deviants who he, and the other Q, will happily eliminate from the Earth once his God-Emperor is restored to power.
So I continue watching. I think somebody has to. I don’t know who else is following “Sinfest” but I think they must all be dangerous and unstable people with the most distorted concept of reality imaginable. And a goodly number of them have guns, though I don’t know if they know how to use them. I expect Ishida’s mental condition to continue to break down, though what form it will take is as yet unknown. Wain lost his ability to tell stories, but Ishida’s storytelling is looking more and more like hate propaganda — the sort Joseph Goebbels once put out about the Jews, just not as subtle or polite. For that alone, it bears watching. So I watch.
Frankie D.
There was quite a good read through thread on twitter highlighting the decent into madness a little while back. Not terribly helpful now that twitter has gone to shit…
Meran
Thank you so much for this very detailed, umm, I can’t call it a description really. It’s a great analysis. (That’s the word..) and fascinating. I almost (~almost) want to see it for myself. (It’s like watching a train wreck happen: Horrible, yet Fascinating at the same time.)
You are doing a great job, I think. I hope you’re writing this stuff up. Sadly, it may be needed sometime in 2024/2025 for evidence.
Geez. Brains/minds truly are fragile.
Pete Rogan
Thank you, Meran. Comics are a surprisingly rich creative field, expanding on the original concept of sequential art into forms and subjects as wild and varied as Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” and Alan Moore, Dave Gibbon and John Higgins’s “The Watchmen” to Richard Thompson’s exploration of comics in his “Cul de Sac,” where Alice Otterloop fails to grasp sequentiality and thinks every panel features new identical characters. But then, she’s four years old. I’m fascinated by the interplay of various kinds of storytelling, visual, verbal, onomatopoetic and emotional. The more complex the depiction(s), the more I’m fascinated.
“Sinfest”‘s original exploration of art, expression, misapprehension and a rather cutesy approach to spirituality had no counterpart, and I found it truly amazing. With the introduction of the Devil’s sons and his ex-wife, along with female revolutionaries against the patriarchy, personified by the Devil, Tatsuya Ishida seemed about to embark on a more complex and darker form of storytelling, again without parallel in cartooning. The sudden arrival of confusion, hostility, political grandstanding and very obvious demonizing of people that the Q don’t like tore this fabric apart. It came out of nowhere, didn’t adhere to any storyline, but quite plainly was meant to appeal to an audience equally if not more confused, hostile, politically turbulent, and discontinuous.
I’ve had occasion to read the postings of Q followers and what comes out of them is a stream of incoherent rage. This seems to be the only thing they have in common with each other. Often they don’t realize they’re holding and arguing for opposite viewpoints at the same time. If insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results, what do you call people who say different things at different times but expect the world to conform to their demands? “Q” seems strangely incomplete, but trying to find sense in them is like trying to grab a handful of hate. What’s there is untouchable, but is aimed at you because you’re not Q. The weaponization of incoherence.
That Ishida is trying to make a sequential comic out of this incoherence would itself be remarkable, if it wasn’t plain he’s caught up in the craziness past redemption. Don’t feel you have to try and catch up; after 2016, what came out of Ishida was less and less his own creation and more the reflection of a worldview past imagining, but not past outraging him. It’s a psychological study now, not a comic as I understand the term.
But I have to say it won’t meet the standard for evidence of anything other than a deep mental and emotional disturbance. It may well influence people to use violence to make their incoherence felt, but it’s only one of many, many such flows of incoherence and rage with no one set target. I can’t even say Ishida reflects any particular trend in Q other that increasing rage and senselessness. But I’m also aware I could be watching the trajectory of a Molotov cocktail on its way to a target I don’t rightly perceive yet — if any, other than other people, whose identity no longer matters.
I won’t crowd the comments here with more of Ishida. If you want to see him in action, his site is still up. But you’d better have a strong stomach. Me, I’d rather concentrate on Christopher’s work here, and the stories he’s telling. They seem more sensible and calming, which is what I daresay we all need more of in these crazed times.
I gotta wonder when Tesfay feels he’s had enough of Silwellyia, and what he and his parasite want to do next. If anything, which is itself a conundrum. Going to be fun to see how he sorts all that out, for sure.
Ernesto
I second that. Your review, Pete, is insightful and very interesting to read
Thorfinntk
When I first read through the original series and got to the part where the wheels came off, I were reminded of the descriptions I’ve seen of the way some young moslem men, who have hitherto been indifferent to their ancestral religion, or downright dismissive of it, suddenly become radicalized enough to commit mass murder in its name.
tlhonmey
Sinfest has always been built around highly offensive stereotypes. It just used to focus primarily on groups that it’s considered acceptable to offend in most circles.
That said… I used to be able to pick out some philosophical point he was making or some contradiction he was pointing out… Lately it seems to merely be an exercise in cramming as much tactless offensiveness as possible into each strip without actually trying to say much of anything different or interesting.
Pete Rogan
PARASITES is PARASITES is PARASITES.
SYMBIONT! SYMBIONT! SYMBIONT! SYMBIONT! SYMBIONT!
When even one of their own realizes what his “family” really is, it’s time to bring out the hazmat suits and the disinfectant. Silwellyia needs to be marked as biologically contaminated to prevent anybody else landing there, ever.
What chills me the most, though, is that Emily has already pronounced them not as bad as other known parasitic symbionts. Who needs the Stribs when you could have one of the OTHER symbionts come to dark Earth and decide it makes a suitable colony site? Makes Cordyceps sound no worse than hay fever.
I’m getting OFF this turkey planet. TAXI!! Spaceport, please!
russell
Begging the question of where the first one came from.
Families are often made up of emotional parasites.
i’m just gonna cling here for a minute.
D’you think it’s time to take Sinfest down from comic links, due to things like this week’s plotline about how trans women are pedophiles and seeing a mother breastfeed a baby drives them insane with envy ‘cuz it reminds them of how they’re fake so they buy a baby and obnoxiously have the baby suck on their nipple in front of the mom to show up the mom and they’re getting off on it and they get a boner and the woke emergency services won’t do anything about it so the only thing that can stop trans women abusing children are righteous all-american men with guns who say trans women are zombies since deciding your enemy is not human always goes great?
Its current fans might say I’m doing this for woke ideological purity, but I’m more concerned about holy FECK.
Awful. I stopped reading that comic years ago because of the levels of hate it contained.
Same here. The early years of Sinfest were fun to read. When it turned into a radical feminist misandrist diatribe I deleted it from my comic links.
Yeah, Tatsuya went off the rails years ago. I haven’t thought about that comic in ages.
I have never heard of this comic and am sorry to learn it exists.
Thank you, @Fish. Yeah. Taken down. I knew he’d gone far right a while ago, but didn’t remember I had a link up to his more-and-more intolerant work.
I should look at my links again someday, I probably built that list about a decade ago. Half the links are probably dead.
Well, I see only five where I know the website to be gone (Marooned, Anders loves Maria, Finn and Charlie, Kinokofry and Templar, AZ) – but I do count to 30 that either have finished or gone without updates for a year or more
I’ve followed Tatsuya Ishida’s “Sinfest” since it first went public about twenty-three years ago. It could be a little abstruse in its sexist treatment of female characters, which was puzzling until I read of the murder spree of Elliott Rodgers and determined that, like Rodgers, Ishida was himself an incel — or ‘involuntary celibate,’ an auto-isolating social deviant with rather self-centered and hostile ideas about how human sexuality works and why they are, to their minds, deliberately excluded from participating. This made the psychology of his characters and the rather bizarre behavior of the leads comprehensible.
The entire comic’s focus and relationship with its characters changed dramatically in 2016, with a decidedly political angle intruding where it hadn’t been before. Over time, virtually the entire cast has been replaced by short-lived parodies of one type of social ‘deviant’ or another, until the entire comic set itself firmly against the very idea of transsexuals and the notion, very plainly obscene to Ishida, that these should be treated as if they were people. They plainly are not, in “Sinfest.” They’re singularly, defiantly perverse, openly and aggressively pedophilic, and he has portrayed male-to-female trans people as husky men, often with beards, whose crotches bulge considerably more than any other male character’s. They are also dedicated to the sexual mutilation of children — it goes without saying that only male children could be mutilated the way Ishida imagines it. This would all be merely deeply embarrassing if it were not overtly hostile and plainly an incitement to violence.
It didn’t help that other political elements appeared that made it clear Ishida fully subscribes to the Q panoply of misinformation, conspiracythink, and open hostility to democracy. It got bad enough that, early this year, Patreon kicked him off their site, and he’s had to go to right-wing sites to try and sell cartoons and restore his considerably-reduced income.
I still follow the comic because the entire downward trend of Ishida’s work — his exaggerated hostile parodies, depicting Joe Biden as a sort of transsexual-pedophilic Two-Face from the Batman comic and movies, and more and more his use of exaggerated clashing colors, brings to mind the descent into madness of another once-harmless artist and cartoonist, Louis Wain. In the late 19th Century Wain was famous for his anthropomorphized cats and kittens, and his short-lived venture into cartooning. Later in his career his work changed in style and presentation; he began to depict cats as increasingly geometric forms (a later generation would recognize elements of fractal construction in them) and used increasingly dramatic and non-organic colors in his works. His later works scarcely resemble cats at all, and of course by this time he was not merely unproductive but institutionalized. He wasn’t particularly physically dangerous but, as his art showed, he was plainly quite mad. Tatsuya Ishida is showing the same tendencies, right down to the distortions of his older, pre-2016 characters, and his use of exaggerated colors.
I believe we are watching the public deterioration and mental breakdown of a Web cartoonist, something I can’t recall seeing anywhere else. It may be unprecedented in modern times and it is certainly not complete yet. Ishida has hinted that he expects 2024 to be a year shaken by extreme political violence, and the restoration of Donald Trump to the Iron Throne of America, not necessarily by voting. All this from a man who once depicted the Devil as an unsuccessful con man and God as a set of hand puppets in the clouds. God, the Devil, and even the calm Buddha and Dragon have disappeared from his work now. This week he has a jealous ‘trans’ man buying a baby to ‘nurse’ it in front of a ‘normal’ breastfeeding woman to taunt her, and the readership. I think it’s safe to say that Tatsuya Ishida no longer possesses his senses, and is proud to show that we are all deviants who he, and the other Q, will happily eliminate from the Earth once his God-Emperor is restored to power.
So I continue watching. I think somebody has to. I don’t know who else is following “Sinfest” but I think they must all be dangerous and unstable people with the most distorted concept of reality imaginable. And a goodly number of them have guns, though I don’t know if they know how to use them. I expect Ishida’s mental condition to continue to break down, though what form it will take is as yet unknown. Wain lost his ability to tell stories, but Ishida’s storytelling is looking more and more like hate propaganda — the sort Joseph Goebbels once put out about the Jews, just not as subtle or polite. For that alone, it bears watching. So I watch.
There was quite a good read through thread on twitter highlighting the decent into madness a little while back. Not terribly helpful now that twitter has gone to shit…
Thank you so much for this very detailed, umm, I can’t call it a description really. It’s a great analysis. (That’s the word..) and fascinating. I almost (~almost) want to see it for myself. (It’s like watching a train wreck happen: Horrible, yet Fascinating at the same time.)
You are doing a great job, I think. I hope you’re writing this stuff up. Sadly, it may be needed sometime in 2024/2025 for evidence.
Geez. Brains/minds truly are fragile.
Thank you, Meran. Comics are a surprisingly rich creative field, expanding on the original concept of sequential art into forms and subjects as wild and varied as Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” and Alan Moore, Dave Gibbon and John Higgins’s “The Watchmen” to Richard Thompson’s exploration of comics in his “Cul de Sac,” where Alice Otterloop fails to grasp sequentiality and thinks every panel features new identical characters. But then, she’s four years old. I’m fascinated by the interplay of various kinds of storytelling, visual, verbal, onomatopoetic and emotional. The more complex the depiction(s), the more I’m fascinated.
“Sinfest”‘s original exploration of art, expression, misapprehension and a rather cutesy approach to spirituality had no counterpart, and I found it truly amazing. With the introduction of the Devil’s sons and his ex-wife, along with female revolutionaries against the patriarchy, personified by the Devil, Tatsuya Ishida seemed about to embark on a more complex and darker form of storytelling, again without parallel in cartooning. The sudden arrival of confusion, hostility, political grandstanding and very obvious demonizing of people that the Q don’t like tore this fabric apart. It came out of nowhere, didn’t adhere to any storyline, but quite plainly was meant to appeal to an audience equally if not more confused, hostile, politically turbulent, and discontinuous.
I’ve had occasion to read the postings of Q followers and what comes out of them is a stream of incoherent rage. This seems to be the only thing they have in common with each other. Often they don’t realize they’re holding and arguing for opposite viewpoints at the same time. If insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results, what do you call people who say different things at different times but expect the world to conform to their demands? “Q” seems strangely incomplete, but trying to find sense in them is like trying to grab a handful of hate. What’s there is untouchable, but is aimed at you because you’re not Q. The weaponization of incoherence.
That Ishida is trying to make a sequential comic out of this incoherence would itself be remarkable, if it wasn’t plain he’s caught up in the craziness past redemption. Don’t feel you have to try and catch up; after 2016, what came out of Ishida was less and less his own creation and more the reflection of a worldview past imagining, but not past outraging him. It’s a psychological study now, not a comic as I understand the term.
But I have to say it won’t meet the standard for evidence of anything other than a deep mental and emotional disturbance. It may well influence people to use violence to make their incoherence felt, but it’s only one of many, many such flows of incoherence and rage with no one set target. I can’t even say Ishida reflects any particular trend in Q other that increasing rage and senselessness. But I’m also aware I could be watching the trajectory of a Molotov cocktail on its way to a target I don’t rightly perceive yet — if any, other than other people, whose identity no longer matters.
I won’t crowd the comments here with more of Ishida. If you want to see him in action, his site is still up. But you’d better have a strong stomach. Me, I’d rather concentrate on Christopher’s work here, and the stories he’s telling. They seem more sensible and calming, which is what I daresay we all need more of in these crazed times.
I gotta wonder when Tesfay feels he’s had enough of Silwellyia, and what he and his parasite want to do next. If anything, which is itself a conundrum. Going to be fun to see how he sorts all that out, for sure.
I second that. Your review, Pete, is insightful and very interesting to read
When I first read through the original series and got to the part where the wheels came off, I were reminded of the descriptions I’ve seen of the way some young moslem men, who have hitherto been indifferent to their ancestral religion, or downright dismissive of it, suddenly become radicalized enough to commit mass murder in its name.
Sinfest has always been built around highly offensive stereotypes. It just used to focus primarily on groups that it’s considered acceptable to offend in most circles.
That said… I used to be able to pick out some philosophical point he was making or some contradiction he was pointing out… Lately it seems to merely be an exercise in cramming as much tactless offensiveness as possible into each strip without actually trying to say much of anything different or interesting.
PARASITES is PARASITES is PARASITES.
SYMBIONT! SYMBIONT! SYMBIONT! SYMBIONT! SYMBIONT!
When even one of their own realizes what his “family” really is, it’s time to bring out the hazmat suits and the disinfectant. Silwellyia needs to be marked as biologically contaminated to prevent anybody else landing there, ever.
What chills me the most, though, is that Emily has already pronounced them not as bad as other known parasitic symbionts. Who needs the Stribs when you could have one of the OTHER symbionts come to dark Earth and decide it makes a suitable colony site? Makes Cordyceps sound no worse than hay fever.
I’m getting OFF this turkey planet. TAXI!! Spaceport, please!
Begging the question of where the first one came from.