Man, I just noticed I’ve reviewed a lot of things with demons in it.
Which is the superior Sinfest: the earlier and wackier gag-a-day version, or the more recent dramatic one? Even though the strip’s added a few new themes over time, Tatsuya Ishida’s subject matter hasn’t changed much, more so his approach. Reading through it I was surprised not only by the shift in its writing style, but also by how much Ishida went out of his way to denounce the strip’s past content.
Sinfest revolves around the exploits of various religious figures and their misadventures relating to faith, politics, sexuality, American culture and especially gender roles. Its version of The Devil is the source of not only most of the chaos and wickedness in its universe, but in an interesting twist, also its patriarchal structure and the bulk of its misogyny.
The Big Guy upstairs (no, not Ryback) is mostly a bit player, as are most of the major deities. Instead, our viewpoint characters in the early strips are Monique, a boy crazy feminist and spoken word performer with a hot temper, and Slick, a short spikey haired womanizer with a considerable (and understandable, as it turns out) lack of success. The two friends spend a lot of time flirting, debating with and annoying each other, sometimes all at once.
They’re rounded out by Seymour, a prototypically angry fundamentalist who harbors repressed sexual feelings towards Jesus (who in turn is often drawn as a sparkling bishonen), as well as various color coded devil girls like Monique’s friend Abby and the cold hearted Baby Blue.
A young bookworm named Criminy befriends an insecure pink succubus named Fuchsia, one of the few people Blue is close with, and due to this she gradually loses her instinct for sin. The often bullied son of The Devil, Lil’ Evil, is close to the aptly named Tangerine, who not only has a fun and adorable personality, also a very interesting choice for her personal God:
The later strips revolve around the exploits of a Huey Freeman-ish girl named Xanthe Justice and her group The Sisterhood, a collective of pint sized preteen feminist hackers battling the Devil’s male dominated matrix. While Ishida never throws his sense of humor completely out the window, many of his strips become more earnest, more pointed and angrier in tone on occasion and self reflective, as well as darker and more action oriented with increasingly complex plots (the “fembot” arc being a major example).
A lot of Sinfest’s early humor is irreverent and playful, but cruder and probably more likely to offend some people. Once the Sisterhood rolls on the scene, it focuses on a defined message and is more pointed in its attacks on sexism. So much so, in fact, that it’s arguably superseded organized religion as the key theme of the strip.
Ishida’s art for Sinfest is a cute and charming mix of Bill Watterson and super deformed manga, and even his more naturalistic characters have a heavy anime look. He’s equally good at poignant drama and serious commentary as he is off-the-wall humor and cute gags, so it’ll depend on your tastes as to which periods of the strip you’ll gravitate towards. Also he’s aware of his tone shift’s critics, and has no issue addressing them within the comic- or making fun of himself once in a while.
I think this is another one of those strips where your alignment with the author’s viewpoints are going to be a key factor in you becoming a reader, because Sinfest only gets more aggressive in expressing them throughout its run. But beyond that, I think many of its side characters are funny and well developed, and I had no issue with them eventually taking the spotlight because I thought they were a little more interesting and likable than Slick and Monique. The story progression is pretty exciting so far too, and it’s good at delivering some genuinely touching moments, so I easily see why it has a large following. If you’re ready to fight the man, click here.