I knew vaguely about Sinfest for quite a while without reading it or learning about the whole Broken Base radical feminism thing, so I had a pretty fresh opinion. Bored, I decided to a do an archive binge, which took about 3 or 4 days. I got past the initial Sisterhood plot, then suddenly found whatever energy I had for the series slowly bleeding away with each comic. I found Ishida's character building and character dramas before the Sisterhood to be mildly amusing, actually quite enjoying the romantic plots with status quo conclusions and generic snarky sexual tension dialogue. Maybe they were a little cliched, but I'm a sucker for them anyways.
My complaints at the time were that every time there was a politically themed strip or one that shallowly complained about the troubles of the world like a concerned citizen writing into a newspaper, the same identical frown crossed my face. There wasn't much specific to complain about (other than the election strips, those were... extra frowny), but a theory started to swirl about my head as I read into and past 2011. I think that our author doesn't have much of a personal philosophy, a way of thinking about life through the lens of things that HE experienced and HE figured out and HE rationalized. To put it simply, he takes up banners made entirely up of someone else's thinking instead of taking patchwork from several different views and forming his own.
So what does that mean for the comic? Characters lose their characterization and become strawmen without complexity, just symbols of things the artist considers good or bad. The one shot comics are more often not something mindless about men being bad, porn being bad, dismissive arguments etc. Even as someone that agrees with a portion of the fundamental ideas, the main thing I noticed is that it's just boring to read about over and over again, with no exploration of ideas and counter-arguments, no rounding out of the characters. The series has Cerberus Syndrome bad, but while he heightened the seriousness of the tone and story, there is not an accompanying rise in thought and and analysis with it. For me, it all falls flat. I think he may have realized this by mid-2014 and is trying to write his way out of it, so time will tell. I really did prefer the earlier strips.
Patchwork
I knew vaguely about Sinfest for quite a while without reading it or learning about the whole Broken Base radical feminism thing, so I had a pretty fresh opinion. Bored, I decided to a do an archive binge, which took about 3 or 4 days. I got past the initial Sisterhood plot, then suddenly found whatever energy I had for the series slowly bleeding away with each comic. I found Ishida's character building and character dramas before the Sisterhood to be mildly amusing, actually quite enjoying the romantic plots with status quo conclusions and generic snarky sexual tension dialogue. Maybe they were a little cliched, but I'm a sucker for them anyways.
My complaints at the time were that every time there was a politically themed strip or one that shallowly complained about the troubles of the world like a concerned citizen writing into a newspaper, the same identical frown crossed my face. There wasn't much specific to complain about (other than the election strips, those were... extra frowny), but a theory started to swirl about my head as I read into and past 2011. I think that our author doesn't have much of a personal philosophy, a way of thinking about life through the lens of things that HE experienced and HE figured out and HE rationalized. To put it simply, he takes up banners made entirely up of someone else's thinking instead of taking patchwork from several different views and forming his own.
So what does that mean for the comic? Characters lose their characterization and become strawmen without complexity, just symbols of things the artist considers good or bad. The one shot comics are more often not something mindless about men being bad, porn being bad, dismissive arguments etc. Even as someone that agrees with a portion of the fundamental ideas, the main thing I noticed is that it's just boring to read about over and over again, with no exploration of ideas and counter-arguments, no rounding out of the characters. The series has Cerberus Syndrome bad, but while he heightened the seriousness of the tone and story, there is not an accompanying rise in thought and and analysis with it. For me, it all falls flat. I think he may have realized this by mid-2014 and is trying to write his way out of it, so time will tell. I really did prefer the earlier strips.
I'll admit the art is getting pretty, though.