When I was writing Webcomics, I made a point to include some space to discuss Tatsuya Ishida and his Sinfest comic. I made a point to include it because he had radically shifted the tone of the strip from a
pretty sexist male-gaze-pandering to a radical feminist message, and I wanted to note how his audience reacted. In most cases where a creator wants to shift their messaging substantively, they'll stop one strip and introduce a new one. With clear jumping off and jumping on points for readers. But Ishida offerred the rare opportunity to see how a tonal shift can affect readers and readership over an extended period.
Shortly after Webcomics was published, I was challenged for not including mention of Ishida's hard tonal shift to an expressly trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) message. The reason I didn't include it was simple -- my final draft of the book was turned into the publisher before this newer shift was fully realized. Ishida had indeed begun dropping TERF messafing into the strip, but there was, at the time, ongoing discussion on his own message boards what his overall intent was. Was he actually demeaning the trans community or was he poking fun at the fact that there's even a debate about them? Longer-term fans gave him the benefit of the doubt for a long time, and Ishida himself wasn't saying anything outside of the strip itself. So the is he/isn't he question wasn't really resolved until after my manuscript was out the door.
I re-visited the strip again in late 2023. I tried following it for about six months but found myself pretty lost. I initially thought it was because I was trying to jump into the middle of some larger storyline but it seems he'd taken another turn from TERF messaging to anti-semitism. What was hard for me to parse at the time was that his visual metaphors were so strained that they didn't make sense, using symbols to represent things 180 degrees opposite of what they actually mean.
A few weeks ago, I was told Ishida had gotten worse. I was a little dumb-struck honestly because... how? I mean, Ishida had already taken a pretty firm stance against every group imaginable -- he's anti-gay, anti-Black, anti-Jew, anti-women, anti-capitalism, anti-communism, anti-every-spectrum-of-politics... what more could he possibly come out against? Well, it turns out, he's not aligning against anything new or different now; he's taken a stance on something he's actually supportive of!
Hitler.
I shit you not; he is now praising Adolf Hitler.
(This is why there're no images with this post; literally every strip I might use as an example for anything I'm talking about today has something blatantly offensive in it.)
His current storyline, which started back in December, is all about re-framing Hitler as a hero. Which he justifies by saying that if Hollywood can re-frame villains like Cruella, Maleficient, and Elphaba as good guys, why not Hitler? He then proceeds to relay how all of World War II was in fact a plot by the Rothchilds, who had Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt as their pawns, and Hitler trying to save the world from transgenderism, child sex workers, and physical emasculation. It's so absurd in its positioning, it almost seems like he's satirizing the villain-as-protagonist concept, but there are enough 'tells' to confirm that he's indeed pretty genuine in his beliefs here.
It's certainly not unheard of to present a well-known story from alternate perspectives. Back in the late 1990s, Mark Waid wrote an issue of Captain America almost entirely told from the Red Skull's perspective. Red Skull himself was the narrator and spoke about how oppressed he was by non-Ayran races. How he was the victim, and he his acts of violence against them at the behest of Hitler were only a form of justice. But what was key was that Waid also included a scene at the end told not from Red Skull's perspective, but Kang's and he clarified that what we had seen was specifically Red Skull's version of things and he was contemptably evil. So readers were afforded an immediate perspective that even the most vile villains see themselves as heroes in their own stories, regardless of what the rest of the world sees. But it only worked because of that point of contrast in the last two pages.
(As a point of clarification, the issue that was ultimately published was changed by editorial pretty substantially to the point that Waid asked for his name to be removed from the book. But his original script was later put online, and shows what his original story was. I've got more background and tried to recreate Waid's version of the story here. And to further make clear, the officially published version of the comic with the editorially-revised script takes the same basic approach, but is just considerably less nuanced.)
Here we are, nearly half of a year into Sinfest's current storyline -- still running in daily installments! -- and there's been no indication that everything isn't 100% sincere. He's not presenting any counterpoints in any fashion.
A second key indicator that he's sincere is that his re-imagining of World War II not only places Hitler as a hero, but THE hero against literally everyone else. Ishida has had no issue caricaturing various world leaders but he's notably left Hideki Tojo and Benito Mussolini out of the story entirely. In fact, Ishida has shown Japan as a whole under Jewish influence with only their previous culture to protect them. So he's not coming from the idea of "the Allied powers were in the wrong" but rather "Hitler was the only person working to save the entire world."
Further, the current story make explictly clear that World War II was not only the fault of Jewish people broadly, but the Rothchild family in particular. It's not just anti-semintism -- which Ishida has been displaying for several years already -- but conspiratorial anti-semitism. Ishida portrays Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin as golems under the direct control of Baron Henri de Rothschild in particular. (To be fair, I only think it's supposed to Henri. He's not been given a first name I can find, but it does look more like him than any other Rothschild as far as I can tell.) And they're relying on the "Kalergi Plan" -- a "Great Replacement" style conspiracy theory based on a deliberate mis-reading of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi's Praktischer Idealismus. This all goes well beyond "Hitler was just misunderstood" and requires not only an understanding of Jewish and WWII conspiracy theories but an appreciation and affection for them.
For the sake of argument, let's assume for a moment that Ishida doesn't hold any Nazi sympathies and he's trying to use this storyline only to satirize various attempts of Hollywood to turn well-known villains into heroes. (We'll also ignore that Wicked was originally a 1995 novel that was turned into a 2003 Broadway musical before it finally got to Hollywood in 2024. I'm sure many people who only saw the film version don't know it's origins.) For these types of stories to work, they need to keep the source material intact. To keep the audience following along, they need the source material as common touchpoints, so the audience understands and appreciates how it can be interpretted in multiple ways. Ishida is not doing that here. He's inventing wholecloth new elements that provably never existed. Ishida is not illustrating Hitler responding to external events he may have viewed differently or in a different context than the rest of the world; Ishida is having Hitler respond to external events that never happened. Provably. You can't have readers sympathize in a "well, if you put it that way..." point of view if your "that way" is completely inevented from nothing. No one even heard of the so-called "Kalergi Plan" until it was coined in 2001 by Gerd Honsik -- a neo-Nazi and author of the book Hitler Innocent? in which he tries to justify Hitler's war crimes -- long after Coudenhove-Kalergi himself had passed away.
In 2014, when I last talked about how Ishida shifted Sinfest's focus, I mentioned that it was demonstrably alienating his readers. The forum on his own site had become a virtual ghost town from 2018 when readers at least still logged in to chat with each other, even if they didn't really discuss the strip itself very much. From what I can tell, the last thread took place between May and July 2024 and consisted of exactly three messages: one poster saying he was back after being gone for a year, another responding 30 days later saying "Get ready to watch Tat completely go off the deep end," and the original poster coming back two weeks after that to say he enjoyed the schadenfreude. It looks like Ishida removed the forums altogether a couple months after that; I strongly suspect no one noticed.
I'm still at a loss on how he's surviving; it sure as hell ain't on money he's making from Sinfest. The site has zero advertising on it any more (which largely dried up for all webcomics back in 2016 anyway). He does have some merch available, but he also has a note on his home page from January indicating that both Redbubble and Spreadshirt rejected his designs entirely. Of the nine designs he posted up on Fourthwall, it looks like four of those have been rejected. (There are spots indicating a design with a name for each was there, but they don't actually display anything.) With his radical politics, I have trouble believing he would be hired in any position above minimum wage, and I'd be surprised if he would tolerate dealing with a just-above-minimum-wage manager for long. I have to believe he's got someone (parents? wife? a generous trust fund?) effectively subsidizing his entire life.
I don't know where he gets any information; this stuff is more bonkers than anything I've seen from Fox or OAN. He only uses social media to post his latest strips; he certainly doesn't respond to readers' comments and I don't think he even sees them. Some of the references in his strip suggest he's still interested in media generally -- I've seen him draw elements from The Sixth Sense, Pulp Fiction, Jurassic Park, Saw, A Clockwork Orange, Nosferatu, and That Mitchell and Webb Look in just the past few months. Although he seems to have completely missed the point of each and every one of those, but he has clearly seen them. And just prior to his current Hitler storyline, he was making overt references to various current events. Although here again, he seemed to have a very distorted view of some of the basic facts.
I am by no means a psychologist but at this point, I think Ishida is legitimatly disturbed. Not just because he's had an increasingly overt message of anti-semitism for several years or because he's started praising Adolf-fucking-Hitler. I don't see evidence of any human contact any more. He seems increasinly out of touch with reality. The conspiracies he's subscribing to are increasingly unhinged, fueled by whatever worst common denominator rabbit holes the algorithms have thrown him down. I don't think anyone would be surprised at this point if he shows up at some public Jewish festival with a loaded automatic weapon. Or he blows up a temple. Let me be clear that I have no knowledge or intel that he's actually planning something like that, but reading through and thinking about his most recent work has me legitimately concerned.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Sinfest is an outlet for all his worst instincts, and doing the strip allows him to vent enough that he can still go around like a regular guy. Or maybe he views everything around/about the strip as a giant piece of performance art where he does a big reveal on the strip's 30th anniversary that he's actually a very nice guy and he donates billions of dollars he earned from selling his life story to Steve Spielberg to help Jewish refugees. Occam's razor, though, suggests he's really just a mentally unwell piece of shit and wants to eradicate literally everyone who isn't a cis hetero white Christian, and he might be far gone enough to acting on it one day.
Shortly after Webcomics was published, I was challenged for not including mention of Ishida's hard tonal shift to an expressly trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) message. The reason I didn't include it was simple -- my final draft of the book was turned into the publisher before this newer shift was fully realized. Ishida had indeed begun dropping TERF messafing into the strip, but there was, at the time, ongoing discussion on his own message boards what his overall intent was. Was he actually demeaning the trans community or was he poking fun at the fact that there's even a debate about them? Longer-term fans gave him the benefit of the doubt for a long time, and Ishida himself wasn't saying anything outside of the strip itself. So the is he/isn't he question wasn't really resolved until after my manuscript was out the door.
I re-visited the strip again in late 2023. I tried following it for about six months but found myself pretty lost. I initially thought it was because I was trying to jump into the middle of some larger storyline but it seems he'd taken another turn from TERF messaging to anti-semitism. What was hard for me to parse at the time was that his visual metaphors were so strained that they didn't make sense, using symbols to represent things 180 degrees opposite of what they actually mean.
A few weeks ago, I was told Ishida had gotten worse. I was a little dumb-struck honestly because... how? I mean, Ishida had already taken a pretty firm stance against every group imaginable -- he's anti-gay, anti-Black, anti-Jew, anti-women, anti-capitalism, anti-communism, anti-every-spectrum-of-politics... what more could he possibly come out against? Well, it turns out, he's not aligning against anything new or different now; he's taken a stance on something he's actually supportive of!
Hitler.
I shit you not; he is now praising Adolf Hitler.
(This is why there're no images with this post; literally every strip I might use as an example for anything I'm talking about today has something blatantly offensive in it.)
His current storyline, which started back in December, is all about re-framing Hitler as a hero. Which he justifies by saying that if Hollywood can re-frame villains like Cruella, Maleficient, and Elphaba as good guys, why not Hitler? He then proceeds to relay how all of World War II was in fact a plot by the Rothchilds, who had Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt as their pawns, and Hitler trying to save the world from transgenderism, child sex workers, and physical emasculation. It's so absurd in its positioning, it almost seems like he's satirizing the villain-as-protagonist concept, but there are enough 'tells' to confirm that he's indeed pretty genuine in his beliefs here.
It's certainly not unheard of to present a well-known story from alternate perspectives. Back in the late 1990s, Mark Waid wrote an issue of Captain America almost entirely told from the Red Skull's perspective. Red Skull himself was the narrator and spoke about how oppressed he was by non-Ayran races. How he was the victim, and he his acts of violence against them at the behest of Hitler were only a form of justice. But what was key was that Waid also included a scene at the end told not from Red Skull's perspective, but Kang's and he clarified that what we had seen was specifically Red Skull's version of things and he was contemptably evil. So readers were afforded an immediate perspective that even the most vile villains see themselves as heroes in their own stories, regardless of what the rest of the world sees. But it only worked because of that point of contrast in the last two pages.
(As a point of clarification, the issue that was ultimately published was changed by editorial pretty substantially to the point that Waid asked for his name to be removed from the book. But his original script was later put online, and shows what his original story was. I've got more background and tried to recreate Waid's version of the story here. And to further make clear, the officially published version of the comic with the editorially-revised script takes the same basic approach, but is just considerably less nuanced.)
Here we are, nearly half of a year into Sinfest's current storyline -- still running in daily installments! -- and there's been no indication that everything isn't 100% sincere. He's not presenting any counterpoints in any fashion.
A second key indicator that he's sincere is that his re-imagining of World War II not only places Hitler as a hero, but THE hero against literally everyone else. Ishida has had no issue caricaturing various world leaders but he's notably left Hideki Tojo and Benito Mussolini out of the story entirely. In fact, Ishida has shown Japan as a whole under Jewish influence with only their previous culture to protect them. So he's not coming from the idea of "the Allied powers were in the wrong" but rather "Hitler was the only person working to save the entire world."
Further, the current story make explictly clear that World War II was not only the fault of Jewish people broadly, but the Rothchild family in particular. It's not just anti-semintism -- which Ishida has been displaying for several years already -- but conspiratorial anti-semitism. Ishida portrays Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin as golems under the direct control of Baron Henri de Rothschild in particular. (To be fair, I only think it's supposed to Henri. He's not been given a first name I can find, but it does look more like him than any other Rothschild as far as I can tell.) And they're relying on the "Kalergi Plan" -- a "Great Replacement" style conspiracy theory based on a deliberate mis-reading of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi's Praktischer Idealismus. This all goes well beyond "Hitler was just misunderstood" and requires not only an understanding of Jewish and WWII conspiracy theories but an appreciation and affection for them.
For the sake of argument, let's assume for a moment that Ishida doesn't hold any Nazi sympathies and he's trying to use this storyline only to satirize various attempts of Hollywood to turn well-known villains into heroes. (We'll also ignore that Wicked was originally a 1995 novel that was turned into a 2003 Broadway musical before it finally got to Hollywood in 2024. I'm sure many people who only saw the film version don't know it's origins.) For these types of stories to work, they need to keep the source material intact. To keep the audience following along, they need the source material as common touchpoints, so the audience understands and appreciates how it can be interpretted in multiple ways. Ishida is not doing that here. He's inventing wholecloth new elements that provably never existed. Ishida is not illustrating Hitler responding to external events he may have viewed differently or in a different context than the rest of the world; Ishida is having Hitler respond to external events that never happened. Provably. You can't have readers sympathize in a "well, if you put it that way..." point of view if your "that way" is completely inevented from nothing. No one even heard of the so-called "Kalergi Plan" until it was coined in 2001 by Gerd Honsik -- a neo-Nazi and author of the book Hitler Innocent? in which he tries to justify Hitler's war crimes -- long after Coudenhove-Kalergi himself had passed away.
In 2014, when I last talked about how Ishida shifted Sinfest's focus, I mentioned that it was demonstrably alienating his readers. The forum on his own site had become a virtual ghost town from 2018 when readers at least still logged in to chat with each other, even if they didn't really discuss the strip itself very much. From what I can tell, the last thread took place between May and July 2024 and consisted of exactly three messages: one poster saying he was back after being gone for a year, another responding 30 days later saying "Get ready to watch Tat completely go off the deep end," and the original poster coming back two weeks after that to say he enjoyed the schadenfreude. It looks like Ishida removed the forums altogether a couple months after that; I strongly suspect no one noticed.
I'm still at a loss on how he's surviving; it sure as hell ain't on money he's making from Sinfest. The site has zero advertising on it any more (which largely dried up for all webcomics back in 2016 anyway). He does have some merch available, but he also has a note on his home page from January indicating that both Redbubble and Spreadshirt rejected his designs entirely. Of the nine designs he posted up on Fourthwall, it looks like four of those have been rejected. (There are spots indicating a design with a name for each was there, but they don't actually display anything.) With his radical politics, I have trouble believing he would be hired in any position above minimum wage, and I'd be surprised if he would tolerate dealing with a just-above-minimum-wage manager for long. I have to believe he's got someone (parents? wife? a generous trust fund?) effectively subsidizing his entire life.
I don't know where he gets any information; this stuff is more bonkers than anything I've seen from Fox or OAN. He only uses social media to post his latest strips; he certainly doesn't respond to readers' comments and I don't think he even sees them. Some of the references in his strip suggest he's still interested in media generally -- I've seen him draw elements from The Sixth Sense, Pulp Fiction, Jurassic Park, Saw, A Clockwork Orange, Nosferatu, and That Mitchell and Webb Look in just the past few months. Although he seems to have completely missed the point of each and every one of those, but he has clearly seen them. And just prior to his current Hitler storyline, he was making overt references to various current events. Although here again, he seemed to have a very distorted view of some of the basic facts.
I am by no means a psychologist but at this point, I think Ishida is legitimatly disturbed. Not just because he's had an increasingly overt message of anti-semitism for several years or because he's started praising Adolf-fucking-Hitler. I don't see evidence of any human contact any more. He seems increasinly out of touch with reality. The conspiracies he's subscribing to are increasingly unhinged, fueled by whatever worst common denominator rabbit holes the algorithms have thrown him down. I don't think anyone would be surprised at this point if he shows up at some public Jewish festival with a loaded automatic weapon. Or he blows up a temple. Let me be clear that I have no knowledge or intel that he's actually planning something like that, but reading through and thinking about his most recent work has me legitimately concerned.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Sinfest is an outlet for all his worst instincts, and doing the strip allows him to vent enough that he can still go around like a regular guy. Or maybe he views everything around/about the strip as a giant piece of performance art where he does a big reveal on the strip's 30th anniversary that he's actually a very nice guy and he donates billions of dollars he earned from selling his life story to Steve Spielberg to help Jewish refugees. Occam's razor, though, suggests he's really just a mentally unwell piece of shit and wants to eradicate literally everyone who isn't a cis hetero white Christian, and he might be far gone enough to acting on it one day.
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
