Rage comic

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2008 · 4chan's /b/ board · Also known as Rage faces; FFFUUU comics; F7U12; Baoman; Bàozǒu Mànhuà (暴走漫画)

What it is

A rage comic is a short cartoon strip, usually four to eight panels, made by pasting a fixed set of crude stock faces into boxes drawn in a basic program like Microsoft Paint. Each face stood for one feeling: fury, smugness, loneliness, guilty pleasure. The stories were almost always small everyday annoyances or embarrassments, told in the first person, and they usually ended on a big close-up face that delivered the punchline.

Where it came from

The first one is generally traced to an anonymous post on 4chan's /b/ board, a chaotic image forum, in 2008. It showed someone on the toilet getting splashed by water, ending with a red, shaking face screaming "FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU". That face became Rage Guy. Others copied the layout with their own stories and added new faces, including Trollface, drawn by Carlos Ramirez in 2008. The format moved to Reddit, which had a whole section named after the scream, and to 9GAG and Cheezburger. Websites called rage makers let anyone drag faces into panels. Interest peaked around early 2012. In China a local version, Baoman, grew around the artist Wang Nima's site baozoumanhua.com.

How people used it

People drew up a moment from their own day: a sneeze that wouldn't come, a parent walking in at the wrong time, finding money in old trousers. They'd post it, and others would vote it up or down and reply underneath, often with a single face as their whole answer. Faces also left the strips and became standalone captioned pictures, like Y U NO Guy demanding "Y U NO answer your phone". Regulars learned what each face meant the way you'd learn a small vocabulary, and they complained when newcomers used faces wrongly or padded a comic with stale ones.

Why it mattered

It was one of the first picture joke formats anyone could make with no drawing skill, and a huge number of people online around 2010 could read one at a glance. Because everyone knew the faces, a comic about stubbing your toe didn't need explaining. It also made Trollface and several other faces famous well beyond the strips. Trollface's creator registered the copyright and reportedly earned over $100,000 from it. In China, Baoman grew big enough that the authorities shut its site in 2018 over jokes about national war heroes.

The jokes around it

• "FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU": Rage Guy's scream, the punchline the whole format started with.
• "Problem?": Trollface, used after winding someone up on purpose.
• "Forever Alone": a tearful face for being single or left out.
• "Me Gusta": a distorted face for enjoying something odd or gross.
• "Challenge Accepted": a determined face for taking on a pointless dare.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Give people a dozen stock faces and they'll post embarrassing toilet stories by the thousand. The faces did the drawing for them, and because everyone knew the faces, the confession landed as a joke. Once brands and newcomers piled in, regulars dropped it within a few years.

What noah is not sure of

The exact date and author of the first comic aren't known; mid-2008 is the usual attribution. The $100,000 Trollface figure comes from Ramirez's own reported claims. The February 2012 peak is from Google Trends data cited by Wikipedia. Details of why Baoman was shut in 2018 are as reported in the press and may be incomplete.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.