Current status / schedule Daily Genre(s) Humor, satire | Launch date January 17, 2000 | |
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Similar Questionable Content, Fingerpori, Wumo, Dilbert, Least I Could Do | ||
Sinfest is a webcomic written and drawn by American comic strip artist Tatsuya Ishida. The first strip as a webcomic appeared on January 17, 2000, although the very first strip appeared in print on October 16, 1991 in the UCLA newspaper, Daily Bruin, while Ishida attended UCLA. A new strip is published daily on the Sinfest website. On July 9, 2006, the Sinfest website underwent a redesign and became self-published, no longer a member of Keenspot.
Contents
Personal time with greg sinfest webcomic
Overview
Originally, all strips were pure black and white line art, but larger Sunday strips with full color were introduced shortly after Ishida broke away from Keenspot in the summer of 2006, which also coincided with a site redesign.
Starting around late February 2007 Sinfest's style changed, and it was for a time drawn with different shades of grey. This change in itself was commemorated in a strip. Since February 5, 2012, characters in the Sunday strips have been silent except for occasional interjections.
Historically, the strip has been updated more or less every day, but the period leading up to the split from Keenspot saw significantly fewer comics, with two unexplained dry spells lasting at least a month. Since the new site was introduced on July 10, 2006, there has been a new strip every day.
The subject matter of Sinfest is often human nature, with particular attention paid to human sexuality, gender roles, addiction, and religion. Less frequently, the strip will parody popular culture or indulge in political commentary. There are some recurring types of strip, such as "You Had to Be There" (where the reader is not told what the characters are discussing), "Japanese Calligraphy" (where one of the characters transforms over four panels into a kanji ideograph, usually related to the strip in some way), "Porn Script Readings" (where Monique and Slick read porn star dialogue in deadpan style, except for once where they used flashcards for a Silent Film reading), "The Matriarchy" (a humorous alternate universe which features Slick, Criminy, and Squigly as leaders of a masculine resistance against a matriarchal regime), and "Ninja Theatre" (where the characters take on the roles of heroes and villains in a martial arts movie). Though there originally was little overarching story or continuity in Sinfest, the central characters have undergone some development and several of them are having their backstories fleshed out at irregular intervals, particularly Li'l Evil and Baby Blue. With the appearance of the Sisterhood in late 2011, story arcs have increasingly revolved around concepts of radical feminism, condemnation of patriarchal dominance, and a rejection of heterosexism.
In each strip, a unique epigram appears above Ishida's name, for example: "Da Bomb," "Patent Pending" and "Some Assembly Required." The new-style Sunday strips include no visible epigrams; the epigram is embedded in the HTML as a "alt" description of the image.
Sinfest in print
According to the "Futility Watch" that was on the website previous to the July 9, 2006 redesign, Sinfest had been rejected by newspaper comic syndicates 11 times as of January 25, 2006.
Sinfest has appeared in print in the form of anthologies, released by Ishida's own production company Museworks. So far, four books have been published:
Published by Dark Horse:
In Norway, Sinfest has appeared in the comic magazine Nemi. Unlike the web version it was colored before printing (in addition to being translated) and the epigram was cropped.
In June 2009, Dark Horse Comics republished the first volume of compiled strips and added a bonus section entitled Sinfest: The College Years (When It Was Even Worse). A note from the author introduces the section by admitting that "Sinfest used to be even cruder and harsher back when I did it for my college paper. The original cast had no Monique, no Pooch, no Percy. And certainly no Buddha. It took years and years for me to learn the value of the soft touch."
As of February 2010, Dark Horse has announced it will republish the second volume. A two-page strip, without the usual epigram, entitled Sinfest: Street Poetry appeared in the May 2009 issue of Dark Horse Presents.
Landmarks
The Sinfest universe houses some peculiar landmarks, constant fixtures in many strips of the comic.
Author
Tatsuya Ishida is the author of Sinfest. He was also a penciller for Dark Horse Comics, where he worked on comic books of the licensed properties G.I. Joe Extreme and Godzilla. In the 1990s he co-created and penciled a comic called StrangeLove for Entity Comics with partner Stacy Freeman.