Sinfest and shame

This post discusses and shows comics that are misogynistic, transphobic, anti-Semitic and fascistic.

If I there is a throughline to the writing on this bog (other than depression and Sonic the Hedgehog shitposts) it’s me gradually learning to reject shame around sex, and today I would like to talk about an awful, hateful webcomic as a cautionary tale about what happens if you just let that shame fester, instead.

Sinfest is a webcomic drawn by Tatsuya Ishida that has been running daily, with, as far as I am aware, no breaks, since the 17th of January 2000. I will give credit where credit is due: That is a very impressive feat. I will not be giving the comic credit for much else. It has become an utterly vile piece of propaganda over the years, but let’s start from the beginning.

Wannabe Bill Watterson

The first decade of Sinfest’s publication is characterised by it presenting itself as an edgy, alternative newspaper comic strip, though it never managed to get picked up for publication outside of its own website.

Much like newspaper comics It even had bigger, full-colour Sunday strips:

These two strips are not representative of the whole comic, there is a large variety of topics, bits, characters and storylines that emerge throughout Sinfest’s run, but the temptation and sinfulness of women’s bodies runs through the whole thing. Ishida loves drawing sexualised women but is never fully comfortable with doing so. Initially, as seen above, irony is used to distance himself from it. The pinup is part of a joke about horny men, the demon girls, Fuchsia and Blue, are a temptation that is comedically rebuffed. But as storylines for these characters evolve, desexualisation is used as a shorthand for goodness and turning away from sin and evil. Fuchsia starts to lose her interest in torturing the souls of the damned and fall for a boy, and as she does she starts to dress much more cutely and innocently.

This line of thinking eventually leads to Ishida’s embrace of radical feminism.

Radfem

Starting in 2011, Ishida starts introducing The Sisterhood.

This might read as a joke making fun of the girl on the tricycle for being unreasonable and hypocritical for lambasting a woman for her choice in fashion, but no, this is meant sincerely, even if presented in a humorous way.

In this period Monique, midriff pictured above, becomes a political lesbian and her one sapphic relationship is depicted as entirely sexless, pure. Lesbians don’t find each other sexy, only men do and that’s evil! Sexualisation in general is somewhat toned down in this period, but Ishida still sometimes indulges in showing how awful the patriarchy is by drawing some sexy, sexy, fembots who need to be rescued by The Sisterhood, who are made of of childlike—and thus desexualised and innocent—militant feminists.

SWERF

Eventually Ishida focuses specifically on being anti-sex work and introduces Johnbies, framing the position of decriminalising of prostitution as the position of brain-dead, entitled men who just want access to women’s bodies.

Which, of course, gives Ishida licence to draw some lithe, seductive strippers and hookers to illustrate how vile and immortal sex-positivity is.

Inevitably this obsession with protecting women’s vulnerable, hot bodies from evil men evolves from SWERFdom to TERFdom.

TERF

Transition is portrayed as an enforcement of the gender binary, enforcing sexualised, submissive hyper-femininity on women and aggressive hyper-masculinity on roided-out, sex addicted men.

And Johnbies start being used as a shorthand for people brainwashed by gender ideology.

If this is all starting to seem less and less feminist and more and more conspiratorial to you then you will probably not be surprised to learn Ishida’s opinions on COVID vaccinations.

Conspiracy theorist

Vaccines, gender, oestrogen-riddled vegan burgers, people who are verified on Twitter, Nazis, the sexualisation and subjugation of women, religious dogma. These are all the same thing. These are all the woke mind virus and it’s coming for your children! It doesn’t take very long after this for Ishida’s feminism to be indistinguishable from MAGAism.

Also just look how bad this art is. Compare how stiff and lifeless everything looks compared to the earlier strips. The parents don’t even look like they’re moving. How do you draw every day for two decades and get worse and worse at it? Also he was so proud of the woke Legion of Doom bit that he did basically the exact same comic in June and then again two months later in August.

I don’t think I need to keep tracing the rest of Ishida’s political trajectory in detail. It will suffice to say that, like many others, his obsession with trans people lead him deeper and deeper down the conservative rabbit hole until he became an open Nazi. And I don’t mean that as a pejorative or exaggerated statement of unpleasant beliefs, I mean he genuinely thinks that the Jews are behind the fall of the West and the Third Reich was in the right.

Nazi

I have never been a fan or follower of Sinfest, even before it’s descent into open fascism, but I would occasionally see people online discussing its weird turns and every once in a while I would have a look at it out of morbid curiosity to see how bad it could get. It was fascinating to watch someone go down this path from radfem to proudly declaring how the white race must reclaim its culture despite, as you might have guessed from the name, Ishida not being white himself. And sometimes he would drop something incredibly funny in how pathetically low-effort it was like the Gender Riddler.

But eventually Ishida published a strip I felt finally made the story of the degradation of this man’s art and soul make sense to me, that made the pieces click together in my mind, and after that I stopped having an interest in subjecting myself to his work.

White knight

Sinfest features a lot of rambling, repetitive storylines that start off self-contained an then shift suddenly back to Ishida’s bugbears (though really that has been, for a while, just The Jews), but in April of 2025 he started a riff on Snow White.

The poison apple is overloaded as a signifier for so many things that Ishida has railed about over and over again. Liberalism is a Jewish plot to trick people into open borders to allow the great replacement, gender ideology and sex-positivity is a Jewish plot to brainwash women into being sluts, porn is a Jewish plot to weaken men, Christianity is a Jewish plot to make the West weak and gay. It is, quite frankly, as tiresome as it is vile. But what stood out to me was not Snow White herself, but the prince.

The price, on a mission to rescue Snow White from being a slutty little slut, also takes a bite of the poisoned apple and starts to fall to temptation, turning into a soyjak Johnbie the moment he sees another sexy woman and then just, dying of being horny I guess?

And I feel like this summarises the poison at the heart of Sinfest—its original sin and the constant throughout the entire thing: Ishida feels guilty over finding women sexy and enjoying sexualisation. From the early ironic sinfulness, to the feminism, the anti-trans crusade, the conservatism and the fascism, he loves drawing women’s bodies in a sexualised manner and hates himself for it. He is the prince, failing to live up to his morals and finding enemies to blame for turning women to vile temptresses that he lusts after and cannot reject the allure of. Who is sexualising all these awful whores? The Devil! The patriarchy! The sex-positivity movement! The queers! The liberals! The communists! The Jews! Not Tatsuya Ishida, certainly.

The Snow White plotline does not actually stop there—the power of true love magically saves Snow White and the price and they become a perfect, chaste, heterosexual couple and comic kind of loses track of any kind of coherent plot as it goes into various tangents about the Jews and woke brainwashing again because Sinfest is just a very bad comic even outside of its politics—but for me that was the real end of Sinfest. I had been fascinated by seeing the TERF to Nazi pipeline laid out step by step, but with this strip I felt an understanding of it click into place about what happened here, about how shame can fester into something horrendous and evil if you refuse to face yourself over it. And also so much of the comic after this is just about Hitler being right. There’s nothing interesting or worth seeing there.

Don’t read Sinfest.