Monday, November 17, 2008

Sinfest: Web Comic

Sinfest!

I completely enjoy and recommend Sinfest, a nicely drawn, but even better written, webcomic by Tatsuya Ishida.




Think of Calvin of "Calvin And Hobbes" growing up, trading the tiger for a girlfriend, and keeping his innate honesty while addressing an unsentimental adult world.


The first strip (January 2000) pretty much defines the concept:


I also like Tatsuyo's sardonic blogging on webcomics:

"... Here survive the lost, unsung warriors of comic strip art, the Not-Ready-For- Syndication misfits and rejects, broke but not yet broken, peddling their labor of love like cheap whores (or, to use more delicate parlance, discount whores), in a grungy, backwoods subculture of freelance burnouts and dreamers.

Sounds like my kind of place...

...Web comics is grass-roots, word-of-mouth, guerrilla-style 'tooning, where audience participation is key. Fans support sites by clicking ads, even if they haven't the slightest inclination to check out Whatevertheshit Online Enterprises. Still others stuff the ballot boxes at Top Site lists, or spam chatrooms with URLs.

The Sinfest readership has been exorbitantly generous in this regard, and I just wanted to let you know it hasn't gone unnoticed. It's damn cool to have that kind of support. Mad love and big thanks for all the pimpwork, you bunch of loony fanboys and girls!..."
Best of all has been his commentary of the Obama campaign, featuring the fabulous Samtron Imperius 200ZX

Sinfest gets on my daily-read list not only for its fun (...comics must be fun! otherwise they're mere Soviet Politikal Art...), but as an example of today's broad democratization of the art and science of political reasoning. Visual reasoning in particular is becoming available to the masses as the transaction costs of developing and promulgating visual reading falls. Formerly, a small number of postermakers and editorial cartoonists defined the visual thoughts of an era; naturally they were limited to the range of acceptable thought that could be financed. Webcomics opens the enterprise up to all by radically dropping the cost of publishing! The only limitation now is the content! Whoo-hoo!

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