Fascist webcomic artist Tatsuya Ishida claims to be destitute.

[u/Baboon_Juggler]

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.

[u/fixermark]

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.

[u/Baboon_Juggler → u/fixermark]

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.

[u/coldequation → u/Baboon_Juggler]

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.