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There's some incredibly thin theorizing about relationships based on his self-representation in the comics (2-3 strips have a female figure interacting with Tats' avatar and something that could be a reference to a breakup) but it's all speculation.
I just randomly remembered Sinfest exists today after basically forgetting about it for ages. Its entirely speculative but I think its plausible. His avatar, Slick and Monique haven't been featured in years from what I'm seeing on the fandom site. If I had to venture a guess, Monique was the insert for a woman he was carrying a torch for but was unrequited and I guess eventually he realized being the Bravest Male Feminist™ wasn't going to win her over and got utterly blackpilled.
As much as I can laugh at him, the last few weeks have been.... it's not even funny, it's simply sad. One can be funny with Hitler memes and the like, but the impotent rage Tats has when he draws evil Soviet jewish reddit mods persecuting him while he begs for money is simply.... sad. There is such thing as antisemitism as a mental illness? When you are irrationally convinced that your personal failures are caused by the Joos?
Last I saw he had taken the redpill on Jews but did he ever have a Christian saga or did he plunge into this Nordic Neopagan thing straight from his previous skepticism?
I think the greatest irony of this saga is that I vaguely remember /pol/ hating his comic back when he was full on progressive/feminist calling it "Shitfest" and making edits a la Ben Garrison where instead of the patriarchy they're taking a stand against the Jews/JIDF. Funny how it turned out....
Still yeah you're right that his recent comics are sad. He's clealy an unhappy person, seething about Jews and coping with this bizarre pagan thing.
With guys like StoneToss they're edgy sure but they're having fun. He isn't so miserable he can't tell a joke.
So, one could argue that Tats has work ethic when he is working for himself. He has poured his soul in Sinfest, it's just that as a old broken man his soul is a angry antisemitic scream of pain because he didn't get the hot big-tits romance or the art success he was going for. But in the end, we'll never know.
As much as I can laugh at him, the last few weeks have been.... it's not even funny, it's simply sad. One can be funny with Hitler memes and the like, but the impotent rage Tats has when he draws evil Soviet jewish reddit mods persecuting him while he begs for money is simply.... sad. There is such thing as antisemitism as a mental illness? When you are irrationally convinced that your personal failures are caused by the Joos?
Folks like him operate on how old internet used to be so to speak. Everyone can make jokes about everything and rarely do you find someone actually mad about the joke or subject matter since everyone was smart enough to understand the humor even if they don't particularly find the joke funny.
Folks like him operate on how old internet used to be so to speak. Everyone can make jokes about everything and rarely do you find someone actually mad about the joke or subject matter since everyone was smart enough to understand the humor even if they don't particularly find the joke funny.
He understands humor, and by virtue of that, memes. Memes are always ruined when they get preachy or become "WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS". He keeps it simple like the funnies in newspapers. Just 2-4 panels: setup, and then punchline.
I think with modern Youtube/Twitch/OnlyFans it would have been more successful. I also think that if M&J weren't completely checked out and coasting, they could have leveraged the fact they "own" PAX to have gotten some early Game Streamers into their orbit.
That's a really interesting hypo to contemplate. Part of what made them so successful was their dominant position as a Web 1.0 destination and forum neither of which exist today. They built their media arm off of that audience loyalty. Having a full ecosystem of streaming tools would let them execute better but they don't have the talent or temperament to do a bunch of livestream content. It worked only bc people wanted a parasocial relationship with their favorite webcomic.
OTOH, that would mean needing to interact with "influencers" on the daily, so given they are able to eat off residuals and already paid off their mortgages, they probably actually made the objectively right choice.
StoneToss makes establishment libs go berserk bc he is funny and their mental model is that it's 2004 forever, the onion is moderately edgy, we are still living in the afterglow of Clinton era race relations
That's a really interesting hypo to contemplate. Part of what made them so successful was their dominant position as a Web 1.0 destination and forum neither of which exist today. They built their media arm off of that audience loyalty. Having a full ecosystem of streaming tools would let them execute better but they don't have the talent or temperament to do a bunch of livestream content. It worked only bc people wanted a parasocial relationship with their favorite webcomic.
what I meant was that if there had been a twitch-equivalent at the time, they likely could have leveraged that and maintained relevancy.
Per my mentioning of colabs, as the "owners" of PAX and figureheads of Child's Play, getting early names like PewDiePie and ...jesus I don't even remember who else, but it'd have been a no-brainer to get them on PAX streams and charity streams. Again, combo this with "Office Big Brother" with routine """celebrity""" guests and you have a pretty solid media force just due to their positioning.
ITs very likely this would have a knock down effect wehre they would have been tied in better with the gaming community and likely wouldn't have faded to "also ran" status on the relevancy landscape - no small part due to the fact the comic wouldn't have devolved to "Raising kids, amirite?" for gamerfag boomers.
But by the time Twitch actually hit it big, it was too late. PATV had folded and MAJ were in full coast mode. Even with their PAX ties and charity, they would have been hat-in-hand begging instead of still having enough pull to play kingmakers.
Which is a shame because fifteen years ago, Tats was able to accept that his problems were his own fault.
He wrote a blog post when Dark Horse finally put out the second Sinfest collection years after the first came out admitting that it was down to him for taking too long. He talked about how back in the 90s he broke into the comic book industry, something notoriously difficult, when he was only 25 or so and within a couple of issues of work just decided to quit, much to the shock of the editor who knew he could do it if he just buckled down and did the work. And ended the blog post saying he was done being that guy and that the third collection would come out much quicker. And then it never released.
I don't know if he's married, he never talks about himself, or if he has kids. I doubt it because the webcomic game, especially these days, is a single man's pursuit. The dude who made Dueling Analogues said multiple times that he was successful enough that he could have made it his full time career if he was single, but it wasn't bringing in enough to support his wife and kids, so he ended up quitting. Unless his wife is paying all the bills, which could happen.
ITs very likely this would have a knock down effect wehre they would have been tied in better with the gaming community and likely wouldn't have faded to "also ran" status on the relevancy landscape - no small part due to the fact the comic wouldn't have devolved to "Raising kids, amirite?" for gamerfag boomers.
I think they are so personally offputting that they would eat shit on camera almost immediately, faces made for radio/webcomics etc.
It seems like the media/discursive space for
Dickless Gen X gamerdads has vanished post-covid, as reddit became terminally retarded they were all subsumed into the Reddit hivemind.
i mean they readily admit they do not look like their avatars. (though with Gabe's artistic backsliding the characters are looking more and more like their real life counterparts....) but they aren't the only "faces made for vtubing" in the streaming world; hell they got a real VA to voice Tycho in any vocalized media, they seem aware of their short comings and I think that goes a long way to mitigating.
I think you probably aren't too far off that without Cho to play charismatic front man and hype them up/smooth away the autistic prickles, their interactions with even minor celebs would probably not necessarily develop in their favor.
But they seemed to do alright at convention panels (the in-the-room audience loved the dickwolf).
Assigned Male is pretty bad, and so is Lefty Comics by Barry Deutsch. The absolute worst, though, I never see anyone mention: Mike Stanfill's Raging Pencils.
Is Raging Pencils really worse than Lefty Comics? For comparison, I offer the most recent Raging Pencils and the most recent Lefty Comics:
There's something I find particularly offensive about the profusion of cutesy little details and awkward visual gags crammed into every single panel of Lefty Cartoons. They overwhelm the eye and distract from the message (which is usually "Trump Bad"). The art in Lefty Cartoons is certainly more technically competent, but Raging Pencils has the virtue of a simple style that is relatively easy on the eyes.
There's something I find particularly offensive about the profusion of cutesy little details and awkward visual gags crammed into every single panel of Lefty Cartoons. They overwhelm the eye and distract from the message (which is usually "Trump Bad"). The art in Lefty Cartoons is certainly more technically competent, but Raging Pencils has the virtue of a simple style that is relatively easy on the eyes.
I completely agree. I don't understand why Deutsch finds this appealing; perhaps it's senility. Deutsch's early comics look pretty good in my opinion, but his style slowly degenerated, and now most of his comics are drawn by other people. When he draws them himself, he typically draws ugly gremlin people with giant bulbous heads.
There are two reasons I said Stanfill was worse: first, that I've been reading Deutsch's comics for over a decade now, and his bad art and obsession with "chicken fat" are recent developments. Second, Deutsch's comics usually at least follow the cadence of a reasoned argument. Admittedly, the one you posted is a bad example of that, so here's another (actually drawn by him):
This comic sets out to make a point. By demonstrating an example of hypocrisy among his political opponents, this comic could actually influence what its reader believes. Granted, he would have to be pretty ignorant of any context to find the argument compelling, but Deutsch at least tries to invoke logic. I don't think I've ever seen a single comic by Stanfill that wasn't just ad hominem. His comics always boil down to "Republicans are wrong because they are stupid and malicious," and often he'll throw "ugly" in there as well. There's absolutely zero substance to his work.
I want to point out for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar that the author of Lefty Cartoons includes a written transcript, presumably (supposedly) for the benefit of people who are sight-impaired. For example, this extremely witty and pleasant-to-look-at comic...
...is followed not only by a transcript of all the dialogue, but also by a summary of all the "fun" (i.e., obnoxious) visual gags "hidden in" (i.e., obtrusively cluttering) the comic:
In the King George panel, a bottle is labeled “Royal Brain Tonic. Contains arsenic and mercury.” A strange tentacle is reaching up to the window. The note George is writing says “I have no idea what,” an allusion to my brain drawing a blank when it was time to fill that in. A crown is hanging on a coat rack. The dog is wearing a peruke (aka a curly white wig). There’s a framed portrait of Lucy from “Peanuts,” wearing a crown.
In the MacArthur panel, MacArthur is admiring himself in the mirror (MacArthur was famously an egotist). A “MASH” lunchbox has a picture of Hawkeye holding a cocktail. The bird on MacArthur’s hat is holding some marijuana and a missile. There’s a baseball above its head, and the ribbon it’s holding says “Most Overdone Hat.”
In the Cheney panel, there’s a trophy labeled Best Sneer 2003. A framed note says: Dear Dicky, please don’t shoot me in my face and then make me apologize. Love, Harry.
In the Obama panel, the Fox News logo actually says “New Foxes.” The chyron says “Obama declared king of snobs,” and the second line says “fam tortures cartoonist with incessant sports TV.” On the wall in the background is a basketball hoop, and a framed Nobel Peace Prize, labeled “Presented to Barack Obama in recognition of his achievements in not being George Bush.” A mouse in the foreground is reading “The Cider Mouse Rules.”
In the Trump panel, a huge container on the nightstand is labeled “Tub o’ Orange: executive face goop.” Trump’s pajamas are covered with his “T” logo, which is also on his pillow. There’s a framed picture of Greenland inside a heart. There’s a framed print of Trump’s sketch of a woman’s nude torso (which he infamously sent to Jeffrey Epstein). A note lying on the bed says “Dear Don, you are the GREATEST smartest strongest leader EVER! Yrs, Don.” There’s a hole in the wall near the floor, and we can see an eye peering out.
In the AI Lincoln panel, protesters hold signs saying “Don’t blame me, I voted for AI Nixon” and “Unfair, Unreal, Unplug.” The podium has a seal with the X (formerly Twitter) logo and the words Formerly Known As The United States of America. The AI Lincoln on the screen is not wearing a hat, but a stovepipe hat is perched atop the screen.
It's not bad enough that he puts Chewbacca or whatever into the background of the comic, he also has to announce that fact in text at the bottom of the comic.
I'm sure you've noticed that a lot of Lefty Cartoons feature a dumb and bad person who is white and a smart and good person who is not white. For once I'd like to see the blabbering Trump-supporting ignoramus be black and the kind and reasonable progressive be white.
Deutsch at least tries to invoke logic. I don't think I've ever seen a single comic by Stanfill that wasn't just ad hominem. His comics always boil down to "Republicans are wrong because they are stupid and malicious," and often he'll throw "ugly" in there as well. There's absolutely zero substance to his work.
TLDR: a chick is airing out her petty grievances about her BF and then ends up angry at herself cause he seems genuinely loving.
It sits at 0 points on Plebbit's r/comics, second most controversial of all time (outdone only by Pizzacake) and people are already making memes about it:
It sits at 0 points on Plebbit's r/comics, second most controversial of all time (outdone only by Pizzacake) and people are already making memes about it: View attachment 9562114View attachment 9562128
'The worst thing she can say is no' comic only touches on a tiny portion of the fuckery of this. Even better (worse..?) is the artist clearly knows they're an absolute fuckface. They've portrayed their boyfriend as a retarded toad who barely notices her.. then admits that actually no he loves her. Takes care of her. Is always there. Even says sweet things implying he really is head over heels.
Some people would kill for that. L'il Chudjak deserves better.
'The worst thing she can say is no' comic only touches on a tiny portion of the fuckery of this. Even better (worse..?) is the artist clearly knows they're an absolute fuckface. They've portrayed their boyfriend as a retarded toad who barely notices her.. then admits that actually no he loves her. Takes care of her. Is always there. Even says sweet things implying he really is head over heels.
Some people would kill for that. L'il Chudjak deserves better.
My take on this is its an overly wordy expansion of the "I bet he's thinking about other girls" type comics, where the narrator is supposed to be a shitty, over thinking, downer type. Over analyzing everything, never happy but never saying anything, only settling because nothing is better but doing nothing to improve the situarion, and Chudjak is just thinking about how he loves his girlfriend.
It sits at 0 points on Plebbit's r/comics, second most controversial of all time (outdone only by Pizzacake) and people are already making memes about it: View attachment 9562114View attachment 9562128
'The worst thing she can say is no' comic only touches on a tiny portion of the fuckery of this. Even better (worse..?) is the artist clearly knows they're an absolute fuckface. They've portrayed their boyfriend as a retarded toad who barely notices her.. then admits that actually no he loves her. Takes care of her. Is always there. Even says sweet things implying he really is head over heels.
Some people would kill for that. L'il Chudjak deserves better.
At least the girl has enough self awareness to realize she is being a hypocrite and her standards are way too high, Not the worst woman moment comic I've seen (That one goes to the one about a girl who tells a story about her rapist BF that ends with her wishing him well in life after she gave out the full name of some random cashier who flirted awkwardly at her at wholefoods)
