EST. 2008 • 4CHAN /B/

RAGE COMICS

The crudely drawn faces that ruled the internet. Trollface. Me Gusta. Forever Alone. The OG meme universe.

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THE LORE

WHAT ARE RAGE COMICS?

Short multi-panel webcomics built from recurring "rage faces" — crude characters drawn in MS Paint and reused over and over to tell stories about everyday life that end in a punchline. The faces became a shared visual vocabulary: drop in FFFUUUU, Trollface or Me Gusta and the whole internet instantly knew the emotion you meant.

ORIGIN (2008)

It all started in August 2008 on 4chan's /b/ with the first FFFUUUU Rageguy four-panel — a comic about the "toilet splashback" experience. Most early strips were about things that made you angry, which is where the "rage" name comes from, even though most faces aren't actually angry. A month later, DeviantArt user Whynne drew Trollface for a /v/ comic about pointless trolling, and a universe was born.

THE SPREAD (2009–2012)

In January 2009, Reddit launched r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu — "F7U12" — and the floodgates opened. New characters appeared weekly: Forever Alone, Y U NO (lifted from the manga Gantz), Me Gusta, Okay Guy, F*ck Yea. Rage makers like Dan Awesome's Ragemaker and Memebase Ragebuilder let anyone assemble a comic in minutes. By Dec 2011 Facebook Messenger shipped official rage stickers, and in 2012 the New York Times was publishing how-to articles and PistolShrimps' "Rage Comics IRL" videos pulled in millions of views.

THE LANGUAGE

  • "Le X" — "le walking around the house." A mock-French tic that became a rage-comic signature.
  • Derp / Herp — placeholder names and dialogue for stupidity or unimportant background chatter.
  • Like a Boss — doing something in a daring, unbothered way (yes, the Lonely Island reference).
  • Poorly Drawn X — a snowclone celebrating the deliberately ugly art style.
  • Sexytime — exactly what you think it means.

THE LEGACY

Some faces broke out of the comics entirely and became Advice-Animal style image macros — Forever Alone and Y U NO Guy were the biggest. A subreddit called EFLcomics even used rage comics to teach English to Japanese students at the University of Tsukuba in 2011, because the faces communicated emotion across language barriers. By 2014 the original wave had faded under a flood of low-effort generator posts, and in 2018 China's "Heroes and Martyrs Protection Act" got the famous Chinese rage brand Baozou Manhua censored for joking about communist figures. But the DNA is everywhere now: reaction GIFs, Wojak and Pepe, "POV:" TikToks, every "me when" meme — all of it descends from a bunch of crusty little faces drawn at 3am on a Wacom tablet.

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