History
Rage comics: when the internet drew itself in MS Paint
Wobbly lines, a handful of faces and one big feeling per panel. The crude comics that gave us Trollface, Forever Alone and Y U No.
In 2008 someone posted a four-panel comic about a toilet mishap, drawn badly in MS Paint, ending with a red-faced figure screaming FFFFFUUUUUUUU. It was rough on purpose, and it was instantly copied. Within a couple of years there were whole communities making rage comics: short strips about everyday life, built from a shared library of faces, each face standing for one emotion.
A face for every feeling
That library is what made rage comics a language. You didn't have to be able to draw - you pasted in the face that matched how you felt. Trollface, drawn in MS Paint in 2008, meant you had just got away with something. Forever Alone meant exactly what it says. Me Gusta meant a strange kind of approval. The Y U No guy, arms thrown up, meant that something refuses, again, to just work.
Trollface: You tell the office the meeting has moved to room 4.
From comic to caption
Some of the faces were so expressive they escaped the comics entirely and became memes of their own, used with top and bottom text like any advice animal. Forever Alone became the face of every solo Valentine's Day; Y U No is still one of the most used memes on this site.
Y U No: It's 8:58, the meeting is at 9, and the office printer says "PC LOAD LETTER", which is not a language.
The style was deliberately unpolished, and that was the point. Rage comics said that anybody could make something funny with the cheapest tool on their computer - which is the same idea this site was built on.
More stories
- What is a meme, anyway? - A word a biologist made up in 1976 now names the internet's favourite kind of joke. How a picture and two lines of text became a language millions of people speak.
- Advice animals: the colour-wheel years - A dog in front of a rainbow wheel started a whole family of characters, each with one personality and one job. How Advice Dog's descendants took over the internet around 2010.
- From the big screen to the top text - A line from The Lord of the Rings, a smirk from 1971, a beer advert and a squinting cartoon. How film and TV became the internet's favourite raw material.
- Beyond two lines: panels, boxes and captions - Top and bottom text is only one way to caption a picture. The newer formats put words in boxes, beside panels or above the image - and you can make all of them here.