Rage Comics

FFFUUUUUUUUUU—

In August 2008, on 4chan's /b/ board, someone drew a crudely rendered face contorted in rage. Four panels. MS Paint aesthetics. The final frame: a screaming figure with the immortal caption "FFFFUUUUUUUU." Rage Comics were born.

What followed was an explosion of creativity—or at least, an explosion of Microsoft Paint. Reddit's r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu subreddit (f7u12) launched in January 2009 and became a factory of user-generated comics. Ordinary people documented their everyday frustrations, victories, and awkward encounters through a growing cast of characters.

Forever Alone, the dateless loser. Trollface, the smug provocateur. Me Gusta, the gleeful embracer of the weird. Y U NO Guy, the confrontational asker of obvious questions. Each face became a building block, a vocabulary for expressing emotions that words alone couldn't capture.

The format peaked between 2009-2012. At their height, Rage Comics were everywhere: Facebook stickers, mobile apps, YouTube adaptations, even corporate attempts at "fellow kids" marketing. They prefixed sentences with "le" unironically. They said "derp" and "herp" and thought it was hilarious.

And then, suddenly, it wasn't.

By 2013, posting Rage Comics had become embarrassing. The format aged like milk left in the sun. What had felt fresh and relatable now felt like cringe distilled to its purest form. Using a Rage Comic unironically marked you as someone who had not updated their sense of humor since the Bush administration.

The meme culture that Rage Comics helped create eventually turned on them. They became the embarrassing yearbook photo of the internet—something we all participated in but prefer not to discuss.

Rest in cringe, sweet comics. You gave us the tools to express our rage, and for that, we will always be grateful.

FFFFUUUUUUUUU—