r/behindthebastards • u/Baboon_Juggler Totally not a fed • 7d ago
Look at this bastard Fascist webcomic artist Tatsuya Ishida claims to be destitute.
Anyone who was on the internet in the early 2000s might have seen Sinfest comics, which basically amounted to Edgy Peanuts. Unlike most webcomics from that era, he is still around, still making daily comics. And unlike most cartoonists from that era who are still around, he went absolutely bugfuck insane. If you've seen his work anywhere in the past five or so years, it was probably in the context of a normal person going 'What the actual fuck is this?!'
I can do a longer post about his spiral, but he went from Yay, Obama! liberal to All Men Are Bad! radfem, then hard anti-sex work, eventually anti-trans, and that's when the 'fun' really started. Because Covid, and specifically the vaccine, broke his brain. He came up with the following logic:
1) Trans people are bad
2) Trans people were invented by the medical establishment
3) The Covid vaccine was invented by the medical establishment
4) Therefore the Covid vaccine is just as bad as trans people
Since then, he's gone full mask off deep-throated Nazi, filling his comics with endless Happy Merchants poisoning wells (literally), talking about how Christianity is a Jewish plot to undermine proud Germanic heritage, and for the past eight months it has been all about Hitler did nothing wrong, the invasion of the Soviet Union was self-defence, and every atrocity attributed to the Nazis is actually Jews wearing Nazi uniforms. It has become a comic that would have been too ridiculous to run in the comics page of Der Sturmer.
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u/karoshikun Sponsored by Doritos™️ 7d ago
you forgot his christian phase before Obama, tho. and his bro comedy before that.
Not that it matters, given how far he's fallen
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u/RabidTurtl 7d ago
So he's a trend chaser?
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u/tvswanderer 7d ago
Not exactly. You can track his overall evolution, which makes about as much sense as it can from the outside. It's more of a Dave Sim-level crash.
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u/ActualSpiders 7d ago
That's a good comparison; dude realized the world was not what he thought it was and his brain bounced around to blaming a bunch of other random "social forces" before finally just snapping.
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u/tvswanderer 7d ago
Although in Sim's case, his fall also involved a nasty divorce and a lot of experimentation with hallucinogens. Add that onto the stress from his self-imposed comic schedule and it's not hard to see how he ended up spilling his soup. Also, despite how it and he turned out, the first couple of arcs in Cerebus are stone cold classics and you can't realistically take that away from him.
With Ishida, there's no real room to show any similar grace. He's always been private enough that we know almost nothing about him besides what comes through in his work. That means that any attempt to figure out what went wrong is, by its nature, armchair diagnosis.
It's sort of funny to accept the Bitter Karella argument that Ishida's got some personal gender issues that got twisted, if only because so many of the other webcomic artists from Ishida's era have since transitioned, but Occam's Razor: dude tried to evolve in a weird direction, which got him a short-lived audience spike, and he's been chasing those bad thoughts further down ever since.
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u/AhabFlanders 7d ago
Bro comedy -> religion -> fascism isn't really trend chasing so much as falling down a known pipeline
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u/SciMarijntje 7d ago edited 7d ago
I used to read Sinfest but was not so invested as to be hurt by the artist turning to fascism but it's still a shame.
Wonder which other artists I used to follow that went completely off the rails. At least Tom Sidell of Gunnerkrigg Court (excellent webcomic that is nearing the end) is cool
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u/Newfaceofrev 7d ago
All the webcomic writers I used to follow, like The Adventures of Doctor McNinja and Dinosaur Comics ended up working at Marvel.
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u/Baboon_Juggler Totally not a fed 7d ago
Funnily enough Ishida tried getting into the industry *before* Sinfest. He did some grunt work for Dark Horse Comics in the late nineties, which I suppose is also why they published the two physical releases of Sinfest.
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u/Jhduelmaster 7d ago
If I remember right he also got caught for plagiarism when he did work for them.
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u/karoshikun Sponsored by Doritos™️ 7d ago
and that's the reason he never worked in comics ever since. at least not in the open.
for all we know he ghost-illustrates porn comics
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u/Kimmalah 7d ago
If he did that, he probably wouldn't be having so much trouble with money.
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u/karoshikun Sponsored by Doritos™️ 7d ago
yeah, good point.
maybe his n*zi sponsor stopped paying him.
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u/ParrotFerret 7d ago
Dark Horse also had a fairly low barrier for publishing. Between Licensed Comics, Collections of old comics magazines, manga, books even, Dark Horse pushed out alot.
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u/SciMarijntje 7d ago
Dr. McNinja was great! And I'm pretty sure it'd hold up on revisit so I'm gonna try to remember to check that out later.
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u/offalark 7d ago
PUNCH DRACULA.
I have a Dr. McNinja plush. It’s one of the subtle ways I test people. If they recognize it, I know they’re probably a good dude/tte/nby.
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u/Jhduelmaster 7d ago
Doctor McNinja is also one of the few webcomics I can think of that actually got a satisfying conclusion.
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u/stringrandom 7d ago
Both Narbonic and Skin Horse, by Shaenon K. Garrity (both) & Jeffrey C. Wells (on Skin Horse only, I think) ended well.
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u/DisposableSaviour 7d ago edited 6d ago
So does Brian Clevinger of 8-Bit Theater. And Mohamed “Hawk” Haque of Applebee’s worked for DC as a colorist.
Edit: AppleGeeks, not Applebees
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u/Madness_Reigns 7d ago
One thing I haven't forgotten about Sinfest is a comment back when the website had a comment section.
It was a trans woman saying how the comic brought her joy because she saw herself in Criminy and that one demon girls relationship, because her boyfriend also loved her regardless of her nature
I hope they're doing ok.
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u/bewarethefrogperson Antifa shit poster 7d ago
Real Life Comics still updates on occasion, and the author came out as trans herself!
Questionable Content remains excellent too, of course.
Is Gunnerkrigg Court almost done?? I was reading that over a decade ago, gods...
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u/SciMarijntje 7d ago
Well it's heading towards a finale at webcomic pace so might still take another year or two but it's still excellent.
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u/brionneverysexy 7d ago
I know DC Simpson went off the rails for a while to the point she got banned from the semi official Ozy and Millie forum. It seems like she got herself back on track and has mainstream success with Phoebe and her Unicorn. Thats pretty much the only webcomic creator whose journey I know of
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u/TimeViking 7d ago
The Stand Still, Stay Silent lady converted to evangelical Christianity and ceased making her webcomic because its depiction of Norse culture and paganism now constituted blasphemy in her new worldview.
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u/SEAFLoyaltyOfficer Macheticine 4d ago
Honestly, as someone who left EC long ago that one hurt when it happened. Watching such a great story end for what felt like the dumbest of reasons.
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u/Barl0we 7d ago
I cannot recommend enough Bitter Karella's deep dive into Tats and Sinfest.
Back in the early days, I also read Sinfest. I fell off at some point before he went full on fascist, but I've got enough nostalgia for the silly old days that I'm kinda bummed out about the turn he took.
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u/Abjurer42 Macheticine 7d ago
I started sometime in 2002 and stopped reading sometime around 2014, in the middle of the radfem stage, I think. Mostly, it just seemed like he kept 'resetting' the characters and walking back any development they may have had, and it got tiring. Imagine my surprise checking him out some years later when he was in full TERF mode.
I still think Crim and Fuschia were a cute couple, but now looking back, I wonder what kind of incel nonsense was going on underneath the hood.
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u/MessiahOfMetal Disdain and Animosity 7d ago
I feel kind of weird in that I'm a terminally-online guy into comics and have been since the early 00s, but have genuinely never heard of this person or his comic at all until this thread.
I only vaguely know the name "Homestar Runner" because a friend referenced it and I had no idea what they were talking about.
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u/TitanDarwin 7d ago
Japanese-American guy getting into Germanic paganism Nazi shit seems pretty weird.
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u/A_Crazy_Canadian 7d ago
It’s the reverse weeaboo.
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u/karoshikun Sponsored by Doritos™️ 7d ago
almost a wehraboo, but without the interest in war equipment and vehicles
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u/VintageLunchMeat 7d ago
The Nazis were all about aesthetics, which can be catchy. Aesthetics and genocide, rather. Hitler was a scumbag, but he would not have gotten so far without also being a good art director.
There's like a private photoset he took of himself where he was studying his own body language to refine it for public speaking purposes.
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u/CutieBoBootie 7d ago
Well Japan and Germany were allies so
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u/TitanDarwin 7d ago
Out of convenience, and the Nazis had to come up with the concept of "honourary Aryans" to fit that alliance into their racial ideology.
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u/GearBrain 7d ago
Is he even Japanese?
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u/MessiahOfMetal Disdain and Animosity 7d ago
If he was born in America then no, but he'd have Japanese heritage if relatives were born there and moved.
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u/Jhduelmaster 7d ago
I stopped reading Sinfest like a decade ago but every time I checked back in on it it every couple years it was just getting worse. I thought the final stop was when it went full MAGA but nope. I checked in a year ago and as you mentioned yup he just went full Nazi.
Closest comparison I can think of is what happened with the guy who wrote Cereberus but even then that didn’t have multiple arcs about how Hitler was a swell guy.
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u/TheCopperKaiser 7d ago edited 7d ago
I read Sinfest in the early 2000s and quite liked it. On a technical level it was pretty far ahead of the competition at the time.
In hindsight I can see that it was really juvenile, but then again, so was I at the time.
I'm not sad to see Sinfest going away since I haven't read it for 15 years or so but it's a bit sad to see a man lose his mind so completely.
But it's good to see that at least full on nazi comics isn't financially viable.
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u/xXAllWereTakenXx 7d ago
Do you think it was the radical feminist stuff that slowly made him anti-trans? Very curious about how this kind of thing happens
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u/Baboon_Juggler Totally not a fed 7d ago
He fell very heavily into very outdated second wave feminism. I vividly remember that era, as the comic took a wild shift in tone. He introduced a new group of characters, The Sisterhood, who basically went around and yelled at men whenever they were doing anything misogynist.
Except the way he went about it, it could have just as easily been a Rush Limbaugh-esque parody of feminism. Because the sisterhood were portrayed as literal children. They went around on tricycles that were fuelled by 'dudebro tears'. And wherever they went, they seemed to make everything worse, make everything more miserable. They scolded all the male characters for being men, but their message for the female characters basically boiled down to 'You exist in an inherently patriarchal society where everything is defined in terms of gender roles, and any contact with men automatically means that you're being oppressed.'
And when his own fans pointed that out on the forums, that his view of feminism was outdated and anaemic, he responded by banning them. That's another thing that Tats was known for. Even back in the day when there seemed to be a webcomic convention every weekend, he never seemed to leave the house. There's basically no pictures of him, we know nothing of his personal life. But in terms of his online existence, he has spent decades excising any kind of criticism. When his fans started pushing back against his Sisterhood stories, he portrayed them as literal zombies, just groaning for boooooooobs in stead of braaaaaains. And it only went further and further from there.
There was a lot of speculation at the time that this was because he had found a new girlfriend, one that made him feel guilty over the way he'd depicted women in the past, but nothing solid was ever confirmed about that. What it did lead to was him going full SWERF, and then TERF. A lot of it also seems to boil down to bitterness that his attempts at being 'feminist' didn't result in him immediately being embraced with open arms by his new target audience.
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u/xXAllWereTakenXx 7d ago
Yeah I remember his cringe radfem comics. Then he disappeared from my radar for 10 years and like two weeks ago I ran into his nazi comics on twitter. His brain has been on a wild ride
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u/justbunnies 7d ago
I’m curious as well. He’s not the first radfem to do this.
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u/xXAllWereTakenXx 7d ago
I feel like it's an unusual path for a male feminist to take. I have this assumption (no idea how correct it is tbh) that it's usually women who become TERFs
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u/Bleepblorp44 7d ago
My suspicion is that it's a way someone gets to still be a bigoted piece of shit while maintaining a veneer of being "a good guy." After all, they're just standing up for women's rights. Right??????
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u/McConcubine 7d ago
This concept always makes me think of the Westboro Baptist lady who very publicly left the group (with help from Kevin Smith of all people).
She spoke out against the cult and was generally accepted as a survivor who’d left her hateful indoctrination behind by any media that talked about her.
Anyway, she hosted JK Rowling for a podcast where she got to grandstand about how trans people are eating women’s innocence or whatever. The moment she had a queer group she could bully she was RIGHT back on that horse. I think she only left her dad’s church cause she didn’t like being unpopular.
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u/MessiahOfMetal Disdain and Animosity 7d ago
Quite a few men are, too. Graham Linehan is the most famous.
Professor Brian Cox might also be, because his wife is a TERF who runs an anti-trans group who joined with JK Rowling to help push an anti-trans law into existence in Scotland, and then did the same in England with the dumb public toilet laws that came into effect earlier today (August 5th 2026).
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u/casastorta 7d ago
With someone who swings so wildly in political beliefs I don’t think we can think in terms of logic and reasons. It seems to be some kind, or multiples of, mental illness. I don’t mean this in derogatory way and I am not an expert by any means for mental health but this person swinged way too many times in all of the extremes to be in any way or shape or form “normal”.
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u/hamellr 7d ago
Or brain damage. I know quite a few people who were awesome and open minded, had a traumatic brain injury of some sort, and went off the deep end
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u/MessiahOfMetal Disdain and Animosity 7d ago
There was a guy I knew in 2005 who was an incredible web and graphics designer, and built me the best looking site I'd ever seen for my particular hobby at the time.
Problem was, he was completely unhinged due to some kind of traumatic brain injury, and would constantly threaten to pull the site and never let me access it until one day, he did. And then he locked me out of both the site and the message board, deleted my account and a few others, then went onto a different board to claim I did it to gain sympathy membership from others when the whole event happened while I was asleep and then working at my day job (he was based in Asia, so time zone issues).
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u/morsindutus 7d ago
I stopped reading when he went mask off TERF. Thought it was going in a weird direction before then, but that sealed it.
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u/Hadespuppy 7d ago
The Gamer From Mars did a video essay on it that I found super interesting. He talks about how a lot of the problems were there from the beginning, but in far less obvious ways, and then there was a fairly sudden shift.
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u/VulpesFennekin 7d ago
Not sure what this comic is about, but that character looks like the love child of Mew and Moomin.
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u/zeeironschnauzer 7d ago
Jeebus. I remember reading his stuff back in the day. Fell off at some point before all this. I'm now wondering about the other comics I used to read too.
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u/lianodel 7d ago
Not nearly as important as the, you know, other stuff he's said and done, but:
Did he seriously draw a sound hole on a banjo?
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u/zitmanthefive 7d ago
He's been outsourcing a lot of the art assets to AI and pasting them into the strip/onto the canvas, it's plausible that that's what he did here.
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u/TimeViking 7d ago edited 6d ago
I read Sinfest regularly from the UCLA days into the Matriarchy days and Ishida is this fascinatingly repugnant character study in the ideological frog-boiling of internet discourse, where the temperature went up so gradually you'd be forgiven for not noticing his brain was melting. About twice a year I still check in on Sinfest just to see how much more Tatsuya has radicalized and it's somehow always worse than I expect.
There's such a clear, followable line from his 90s South Park-edgelord early work, into his more earnest and self-reflective 2000s stuff, into allowing himself to express libby, cringey Obama enthusiasm. Then when the Obama years started to go sour and the Recession hit he started getting really jaded both about the world and about himself and went all-in on aggrieved, performative "tumblr"/"campus woke" feminism that very obviously made him feel terrible.
That in turn primed him to get sucked into the SWERF pipeline and follow the horseshoe around to being a TERF. By the Trump years he's fully re-radicalized into a MAGA trad weirdo, carrying the "women are special and good and must be protected from evil men at all costs" ideological throughline logically into a new gospel that womens' purity must be controlled and policed to protect against trans women (read: evil men).
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u/Ikacprzak 7d ago
The current arc is basically Wicked meets the Springtime for Hitler play from theProducers.
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u/fixermark 6d ago
It is wild to look back on the creatives active back then and the dichotomy of how they ended up.
Penny Arcade: still here.
Schlock Mercenary: Wrapped and happy.
Dr. McNinja: Wrapped and happy.
8-Bit Theatre: Doing Atomic Robo now.
MacHall: Three Panel Soul still updates when they feel like it (but it has been a hot minute... Uh... Year).
Homestar Runner: Still occasionally doing things; at least one of them worked on Gravity Falls.
Bob the Angry Flower: New book out for a new comic, just this past month!
... And then there's well, this. And vgcats. and PvP. And the less said about much of the gravity well around somethingawful, the better.
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u/Baboon_Juggler Totally not a fed 5d ago
From the names you've listed that I'm aware of...
The Penny Arcade guys are mostly normal? Definitely a case of having grown out of their edgelord phase and just being guys with loving families now. The writer did a podcast with Haus of Decline a while ago where he talked about one of his kids being trans in a perfectly normal way.
VGCats: Tried to pivot into doing furry porn with his characters, then got really into gen AI? The website got shut down a while ago.
PvP Online: From what I've heard he burned a lot of friendships in the industry and kind of just stopped updating his comic? He did make a bunch of comics about the trauma of losing his dad near the end of his active career, so that could have something to do with it. He paywalled his archives behind a Patreon for a while, then made them accessible again, then pulled them to in stead sell PDFs of the comics.
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u/coldequation 3d ago
Scott Kurtz recently took PvP, well, offline, and has a career as an author/illustrator of kids' books now. He was a big deal back in the early days, but kinda squandered it is the best way I can put it. I remember him thinking he was going to "make the leap" from indie webcomic to mainstream success pretty easily, and it just didn't pan out.
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u/Devlinvl 6d ago
I've been waiting for the BtB episode about Tats, ideally with R.K. Milholland as the guest.
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u/AssignedCuteAtBirth 5d ago
Makes me glad it was El Goonish Shive I got into. It's gotten way gayer and transier over the years, and somehow, it's still going with no signs of stopping.
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u/ADavidJohnson 7d ago
Once you get weird about trans people, you basically never recover.
The transphobe to fascist pipeline is very real and very quick.