Sinfest Actually Used To Be Fun
Hi all. Long time lurker, occasional commenter, first time poster.
I discovered Sinfest when I was attending university, approximately ten years ago. I instantly liked its distinctive "toony manga" art style. That and the fictional universe was just interesting and fun! The Sisterhood had already been introduced by the time I got in, so I had no awareness of the massive tonal shift it represented, nor any pre-existing emotional investment in the way the comic was before it. From my perspective, Sinfest was simply a cute little webcomic with a bizarre anti-sex tumblr feminist slant. It was dumb, but the kind I could shrug off and still enjoy the rest of the comic.
Lately I've been getting back into Sinfest after finding out about its current state when a Lefty political YouTuber I follow made a video about the artist's present dive off the deep end. Having drifted away from this comic for a few years and leaving off during the Sisterhood arc, to say the least this was a total mindfuck. It reminded me that I had an old "Sinfest" folder on my hard drive where I'd downloaded random strips I liked back when I followed. Perusing it made me sad because I remembered why this folder existed on my PC in the first place: this little comic used to be fucking adorable!!!
You have the Devil himself as a suited businessman who runs cartoonishly evil businesses, spies on people with adorable little winged illuminati pyramid drones, and gets into petty insult matches with God who only appears as hands emerging from clouds in the sky and mocks back with sock puppets. You got succubus strippers that alternate between pole dancing and jabbing lost souls in the underworld with pitchforks. There are robot girls that question their programming and rebel. There's a stoner pig-bro who flies on his couch through the power of smoking weed. There's a wannabe pimp with a devilish twin who lives in a mirror universe. There's a local park called the "Reality Zone" where characters who step inside are drawn with more realism and none of the cartoony physics work and paranormal beings like devil girls can't even set foot within. There's a simple-minded zombie/ghoul boy who escaped from the underworld and is just trying to enjoy life. There's a sub-plot where one of the devil girls loses interest in tormenting the damned after finding a wholesome relationship with a sweet, nerdy boy who enjoys reading and astronomy. And the personified characters were adorable too: Lil Buddha floating around on a little cloud zapping people with enlightenment? Lady Liberty having a strained relationship with a chauvinistic and war-hawkish Uncle Sam? Father Time being hunted by the Grim Reaper (often in a high-speed vehicle pursuit involving hoverboards) only to be taken down by him every New Years Eve? I sent a female friend of mine the strip Friend Zone 2 and "Do the Friendship Dance!" became our minor in-joke.
Links to some of my personal favorites:
Birthday Party << Oof guys this one...
Ugh... You guys... this comic...^^
Sinfest at times genuinely captured moments of emotion and thought, showing characters going through life's struggles or witnessing its injustices, or just being a nice and easy little "slice of life" piece without any pretense of time investment. The best ones IMHO are the wordless strips like Divinity School, Paradise Lost, Day in the Life 14, Picnic, and Ghost, the ones that tell a story without any dialogue taking place or needing to.
I actually think Sinfest had the potential to be something legitimately good. Like, imagine an actual graphic novel release, with an actual storyline, with sub plots, set in the Sinfest universe, where all the characters are involved. Hell, if Tats had any capacity for introspection and self-awareness, even the Sisterhood arc could have become an opportunity to deconstruct and critique the SWERF and TERF branches of radical feminism. Can you imagine Xanthe having a redemption arc and pulling away from radfem politics like how Monique did a 180 on her own past? ^((It's okay if you can't.))
And speaking of the Sisterhood? I'll go out on a limb here... Having been archive binging it recently, even the Sisterhood wasn't that bad compared to the current slop Tats is churning out now. At least the Sisterhood had plots and story lines. I'm still having fun watching Tangerine and Lil E infiltrate the sex bot factory. The combat dominatrix was a badass. And honestly the idea of becoming aware of a systemic aspect of society and seeing it as matrix-like code everywhere is a cool literary device to actually see in visual graphic format. (I'm personally tempted to use it for religion hehehe.)
But alas, Tatsuya instead contracted the Magavirus and now his brain is flooded with Alt-Right Koolaid. He's just another tragic example of the downward spiral of reactionary politics. It's a tragedy. Ironically, Sinfest and Tatsuya Ishida himself in their current state can be summarized by this strip.
^(EDIT: Corrected the link formatting.)
^(EDIT 2: Changed flair from Sadfest to Question/Discussion.)
Posted Jan 4, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC · edited