#sinfest

The dude who turned his comic into literal Hitler-Did-Nothing-Wrong esoteric nazi propaganda is out of money.

oh noooooooo

I was there when Sinfest went off the rails, and it's kind of hilarious because it didn't go at all the way most folks assume it did. A lot of people have only seen the comic's early days and what it's doing this week and conclude it must have been a straight line from the former to the latter – which honestly isn't a bad guess! – but it actually went through a milquetoast liberal feminist phase somewhere in the middle, if you can believe it.

The trouble is, the comic's author had this whole Grand Philosopher of the Internet shtick going, and this was back when just having a regularly updating website made you kind of a big deal, so they were accustomed to being treated as an authority on whatever subject they saw fit to shoot their mouth off about. However, when the comic took a turn from edgy T&A pop culture parody to didactic feminist allegory, practically no one was prepared to take it seriously; the comic's established readership was broadly unreceptive, and whatever new readership the comic was trying to court found the idea of suddenly treating the Calvin-and-Hobbes-with-tiddies guy as an authority on the topic of feminism laughable.

Of course, I said practically no one. There was, in fact, one notable group who were perfectly willing to kiss the Calvin-and-Hobbes-with-tiddies guy's ass. I'm sure you can guess who.

For those unaware, Sinfest began as a 4 panel gag-a-day UCLA newspaper comic back in the 90s before transitioning to being a webcomic, and it's most well known for a point in 2011 where the comic suddenly shifted to being a serious radfem comic about how all men are the actual devil (including the Actual Devil From the Bible, who has been a recurring character throughout most of Sinfest's run for decades) then became a TERF comic and finally slid down the TERF-to-Alt-Right pipeline and is now currently an Esoteric Neo-Nazi webcomic despite the comic being made by a Japanese American man named Tatsuya Ishida

Here's the issue: as the comic shifted gears, it alienated its audience to the point that there were simply no secondary sources being written about it that could be cited past 2017, which was still well into the comic's TERF era, meaning that with Wikipedia's standards as a tertiary source, no one could update the article to say "this is a Neo-Nazi comic now, bee-tee-dubs" cause there simply weren't enough sources to cite that weren't directly from the comic itself

the problem is that the framing of it was inherently conspiratorial and tinged with a heavy dose of guilt and self loathing

and that is just not a good foundation upon which to build a sane ideology and understanding of the world and so inevitably went from that, though this

and it ended up leading to this:

he is like the textbook case of the radfem to fascist pipeline. because the guy has been making comics every day for decades in here we have a perfect, methodical and granular dissection of how the process happens.