Rage comics are short cartoon strips assembled from a stock set of pre-made cartoon faces, or “rage faces”, that each express one simple emotion. Wikipedia notes they were usually drawn crudely in Microsoft Paint and were most popular in the early 2010s, when they worked as a shared visual vocabulary for retelling everyday frustrations.
Origin
- 2008, 4chan /b/. According to Wikipedia, the first rage comic was a simple four-panel strip posted to 4chan’s /b/ “Random” board in 2008. Its last panel was a zoomed-in screaming face, Rage Guy, yelling “FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-”. Know Your Meme dates that Rage Guy strip to August 2008 and says other users quickly reused its template.
- September 19, 2008, Trollface. Wikipedia’s Trollface article says Carlos Ramirez, an 18-year-old Oakland college student, drew the face in Microsoft Paint on that date. It first appeared in a comic about trolling on 4chan, posted to his DeviantArt account Whynne.
- January 2009, Reddit. Know Your Meme records that Reddit launched the “FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU” subreddit, widely known as “f7u12”, in January 2009. Users submitted original comics there, which created many new characters.
- 2011–2012, peak. Facebook added rage-comic stickers to Messenger on December 24, 2011, and the New York Times ran a how-to on May 9, 2012 (Know Your Meme). Google Trends interest in “rage guy” peaked in February 2012, with “rage comics” and “troll face” peaking at the same time (Wikipedia).
How It’s Used
A rage comic tells a short real-life story and ends on a punchline delivered by a rage face. Despite the name, most faces don’t express anger: Know Your Meme notes the name stuck because of the Rage Guy origin. Creators built strips in “rage makers” such as the Memebase Ragebuilder and Dan Awesome’s Ragemaker instead of drawing from scratch.
The genre had its own vocabulary. Know Your Meme lists “le” placed before actions (“le walking around the house”), #Derp and “herp” as placeholder words, and “Poorly Drawn X” for deliberately bad drawings. The faces were standardized enough that, in October 2011, English instructor Scott Stillar started an “EFL comics” subreddit so his students at the University of Tsukuba could practise English with them.
Rage Face Glossary
Origins below are as recorded by Know Your Meme unless noted.
| Face | What it expresses | Documented origin |
|---|---|---|
| Rage Guy (FFFUUUU) | Serious disappointment, exasperation | 4chan comic, August 2008 |
| #TrollFace | Intention to troll someone | MS Paint comic by Whynne (Carlos Ramirez), September 19, 2008 |
| #CerealGuy | Multi-purpose reaction, often spitting out cereal | SomethingAwful strip by Bob Averill, 2007 |
| Okay Guy | Complying with “okay” where others would object | Reddit thread, August 24, 2010 |
| F*ck Yea Guy | Pride or a small victory | 4chan /b/, February 11, 2010 |
| #ForeverAlone | Loneliness and disappointment | Not documented by KYM |
| #YUNo | Demanding why something won’t happen | Drawn from the manga Gantz, Chapter 55 (February 2002) |
| #MeGusta | Enjoying something awkward or gross (“it pleases me”) | Posted to 4chan in March 2010 |
Know Your Meme names Forever Alone and Y U NO Guy as the faces that became the most successful Advice Animal-style image macros.
Trollface Licensing
Ramirez registered Trollface with the United States Copyright Office in 2010 and, per Wikipedia, has earned over $100,000 from licensing fees, settlements and other payouts. The Wii U game Meme Run was taken down because it used Trollface as its main character.
Baozou Manhua in China
In China rage comics are called Bàozǒu Mànhuà (暴走漫画), shortened to Baoman. Wikipedia says they took off after artist Wang Nima created baozoumanhua.com, which received 5,000 to 8,000 daily comic submissions by 2012. In 2018 the site was banned after jokes about Chinese military heroes Ye Ting and Dong Cunrui, and Weibo terminated 16 rage-comic accounts. That year Netflix also released Next Gen, adapted from Wang Nima’s rage comic 7723.