After nearly 10 years of writing and drawing Sinfest, a satirical webcomic about angels, devils, sex and politics that averages 300,000 hits per day, creator Tatsuya Ishida is still something of a mystery to most readers—even his Wikipedia biographical page says “very little is known about him." But with a Sinfest book collection due out June 17 from Dark Horse Comics—the first major publication for the strip—Ishida took a rare step into the spotlight to talk with PW Comics Week about his disastrous career as comic book penciller, his redemption as a mega-popular webcomic creator and why newspaper syndication is no longer the goal.

Ishida says a life in comics and drawing always seemed predestined for him: “When I read my first Peanuts paperback, I knew that this was it; this was my future. Something about the simplicity and solitary nature of the medium appealed to me." But his path to success would prove both rocky and unconventional, particularly after he "flamed out in the comic book industry" following a stint as a penciller on Dark Horse’s G.I.Joe Extreme in the early 90s. “I botched G.I. Joe Extreme,” admits Ishida. “I did a real slipshod job on that one. Several pages were so poorly drawn they had to get another guy to redo them entirely... I was running on fumes creatively, and my days as a comic book artist were winding down."

After his animation work dried up as well, Ishida says he had “hit rock bottom: out of work, broke, alienated all my friends, just a mess. That's when I put together the first fifty or so Sinfest strips.” He learned HTML, put up a Geocities webpage and became a webcomic pioneer with something to prove. Unlike most webcomic creators, who post five times a week at the most, Ishida adopted a grueling schedule of posting new comics seven days a week, one that he has sustained ever since. “The first seven years it was coffee and revenge. That's what kept me going. My attitude was, 'I'll show them. I'll show them all!'"

In 2000, however, trying to make a living off a full-time career in webcomics was still a huge gamble. Ishida remembers struggling with “the uncertainty of success, the newness of the medium, the whole 'being at rock bottom' thing. But I didn't have much choice but to pursue the one thing I was good at." Once he began self-publishing his own Sinfest collections, however, his hard work started to pay off as he found he could make a living off the strip.

With almost 2 million visitors to his site each month, Ishida's internet success is now bona fide, and his star poised to rise into print with the new Dark Horse collection, which will include the first six hundred strips of the webcomic; and although Ishida sees some of his early work as a barometer of his emotional states during the period—“unhinged, totally off the chain”—he says that time has brought more perspective, "today, the strip is still pretty wild, but there's also more warmth, more tenderness.” He cites the surprisingly sweet "Come Back," storyline in 2005 about the friendship between pet cat Percy and his canine best friend as the turning point when he "quit coffee and revenge. Or at least, I cut down. Now I'm on a quest for truth and self-discovery. That should keep me occupied for another ten years."

While Sinfest has addressed topics like religion in depth, the strip took a much more political turn during the 2008 presidential election with then-candidate Barack Obama making cameo appearances as a guitar-playing "Barack Star," and bank ATMs transforming into giant money-stealing robots as the financial crisis started to grip the nation. "I think the reason the strip went so politics-heavy this go-around was simply the magnitude of the situation," Ishida says. "The collective anxiety over the financial crisis was pretty intense. When Congress was voting on the $700 billion bill, it felt like the whole country was about to take to the streets,” he says. “I'm sure the comic will have more to say about the recession/depression in the months to come. And Obama. He's just so iconic, and he's fun to draw, too,” says Ishida.

As far as the future goes, a second Dark Horse book collection is slated for October 2009, and Ishida says that despite his earlier experiences, he's also open to doing conventional comic books again, “when I'm more settled.” Although he once kept a “Futility Watch” on his website tallying his rejections from newspaper comics syndicates, the idea of publishing his strip in newspapers has "pretty much gone by the wayside." In fact, despite almost a decade of dedication and millions of followers, Ishida still seems taken aback by the sudden recognition of his success in the print publishing world. “Dark Horse was a major surprise. I wasn't looking for a book deal; they just e-mailed me out of the blue. I still can't believe it. I sometimes wonder if it’s all an elaborate practical joke. Are you in on it? Is this interview for real?”