A rage comic is a short cartoon strip using a growing set of pre-made cartoon faces, or rage faces, which usually express rage or some other simple emotion or activity.[1] They are usually crudely drawn in Microsoft Paint or other simple drawing programs, and were most popular in the early 2010s.[2] These webcomics have spread much in the same way that internet memes do, and several memes have originated in this medium. They have been characterized by Ars Technica as an "accepted and standardized form of online communication."[3] The popularity of rage comics has been attributed to their use as vehicles for humorizing shared experiences.[4] The range of expression and standardized, easily identifiable faces has allowed uses such as teaching English as a foreign language.[5]
In the early 2020s, rage comics were revived as 'trollge incidents'.[6] Trollge incidents are a series of memes revolving around Carlos Ramirez's Trollface character from Rage Comics but with a much darker and introspective tone. These memes usually take the form of "Trollge incidents", which are stories narrated in steps and taking a darker tone as the story goes on. There are many popular trollge incidents, such as the "Betrayal incident"[7][8] and "Nature's corruption incident".[9]
How to Create Rage Face (F7U12) comics on iPhone iPad
Part of the success of rage comics lies in the fact that they are easy to create. There is no one person who makes them or official creator. Nor is there one consistent sense of humor in them; rage comics span a wide variety of different themes and styles, with many camps not liking the comics created by other camps. However, the intent of rage comics has never been to create something original, but rather, to use familiar experiences to generate laughs.
Once merely obscure inside jokes on the image board 4chan, the "rage face" comics that now appear widely on the Internet have have been toughened by natural selection as they evolved into a dominant species of Internet meme. The amateur cartoons, made using a recurring set of expressive characters, are used by a growing international community. Far from being insignificant doodles, the faces are now an accepted and standardized form of online communication used to tell stories that can be quick and funny or serious and deeply personal.
The first rage faces appeared in comics on 4chan around the middle of 2007. Though the original number of characters was small, they carried the undeniable traits of rage faces as we recognize them today. Comics were short (typically a few panels long) and featured simple plotlines involving only a handful of characters. The artwork was often amateur, but the primary focus was always on creating faces that showed a recognizable emotion (as the name implies, this was typically rage) rather than on the quality of the artwork itself. The poorly drawn, expressive faces not only made the comics funnier, they communicated the characters' feelings in an easily understandable way.
Dan Awesome, webmaster of Rage Maker, a website where users can make their own rage comics from a library of stock faces, believes that a key quality of rage faces allows them to be universal. "A perfect example is the sad 'Okay' face," he said, "Just looking at that face gives you a pretty good understanding of how that person feels. Expressing that exact same feeling in words would take some creative writing."
Though many of the original comics on 4chan were drawn from scratch, it soon became commonplace for artists to reuse faces that did a particularly good job of showing a certain emotion. The more these faces were reused, the more they encouraged reuse, and the common threads began to appear. As is the case in any population, the fittest individuals flourished and multiplied, while weaker specimens faded into obscurity.
In addition, many new faces have come from outside the rage comic communities. An independent artist created "Cereal Guy" for his own comic, Swanson said, "and that character was lifted from his specific comic and got adopted into the rage comic family."
For example, the forever alone guy represents disappointment and loneliness in life and may be used in a comic where a person goes through a break up. The cultural reference in these Rage Comics is used to make fun of society resulting in humor. In normal life one person may do something and expect a certain response, well in the rage comics it is similar. The responses are displayed through the rage faces and rage characters. Usually at the end of a comic there is a punch line (rage face) that represents an emotion because of the situation that just occurred. One known cultural reference that the rage comics represent is the me gusta guy. This shows a cultural difference because you do not need to know Spanish to know what me gusta mean. This character is usually used in a situation responding to an awkward or disgusting event.
After the first Rageguy instance, other derivatives began to appear. The format of the comics remained, for the most part, the same, with the rage-inducing instance being described in the first three panes and the Rageguy face screaming on the fourth.
Trollface is a rage comic character wearing a mischievous smile that is meant to represent the facial expression of an Internet troll. The image is most commonly used to portray a character as a troll in rage comics, or alternatively, to identify oneself or another participant as such in online discussions.
Schizoposting refers to a large subset of memes that exploit the topic of schizophrenia and mental instability. A notable subformat makes use of Trollface and rage comics to create short narratives about schizophrenia, insanity and conspiracy theories.
This case is different from many of the others we have covered because Whynne is bringing a complaint against both Reddit and a group of Redditors, rather than a single independent actor. Because it would be impractical and essentially impossible to look at every single rage comic with Trollface that has ever been created, we will speak in generalizations and primarily about the role that Reddit.com has played in the alleged infringement.
Rage ComicsTypeComicsCreator(s)Users on 4chan
Rage Comics are series of web comics with characters, sometimes referred to as "rage faces", that are often created with simple drawing software such as MS Paint. The comics are typically used to tell stories about real life experiences, and end with a humorous punchline. It has become increasingly popular to create the comics using web applications often referred to as "rage comic generators" or "rage makers".
The first amateur made comics date back to 2008 on 4chan's /b/ board with the introduction of FFFUUUU Rageguy 4-panes. As the name suggests, the comics' stories were mostly about circumstances that lead to anger or rage. While most "rage faces" are not used to express rage, the name has been used due to their Rage Guy origins.
In January 2009, Reddit launched the "FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU" subreddit (widely known as "f7u12"). This allowed users to submit their own original rage comics, which resulted in the creation of a large number of new characters. Some of the earliest notable examples were the Everything went better than expected and Fuck Yea characters. A full catalogue of rage faces can be found in the Dan Awesome's Ragemaker site.
On October 3rd, 2011, English instructor Scott Stillar created a subreddit titled "EFL comics" for his Japanese ESL students from the University of Tsukuba, Japan to learn english. On October 18th, 2011, a thread was posted to the r/bestof subreddit titled "Non-native speakers practice English using rage comics. Hilariously absurd" that linked directly to the EFLcomics subreddit and has received 2,908 up votes as of October 18th, 2011. The Daily Dot published an interview with Professor Stillar where he explains why he chose rage comics as a teaching tool on October 17th.
The "Derp" and "herp" are generally words used online to signify stupidity (see DERP). In rage comics, the words are used in two different ways. They can be used as placeholder expressions to unimportant dialogs or conditions but is also the name of a character who looks like an oblong circle with a face, usually a derp face, hence the name. 2ff7e9595c
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