Make a rage comics full#

I used to read most of the comics that made it to the front page of the subreddit-the slow process of familiarization was thrilling, and watching faces emerge, proliferate, and become dynamic semantic units in “real time” kept me coming back. Rage comics, then, reward the enthusiast.

Make a rage comics full#

Adding to this apparatus of meaning-beyond-the-immediate is the fact that many of the faces’ agreed-upon meaning isn’t apparent at first glance-only through immersion in their historical instances can the reader hope to receive their full effect. They function as words in the sense that they exist in an elaborate, historical matrix of meaning-but they also act as reducible units of meaning, for faces can be broken down and recombined to form portmanteaus of emotion: a nose of disgust and the eyes of perverse pleasure combine to form some new monstrosity, a Frankenstein with notes of its parts but a melody all its own. In the course of successive iterations, these faces turn semantic. Once canonized the face becomes easily accessible-magnifying its canonicity. Every popular face, after having crowd-sourcingly bloomed on the subreddit, finds a home there. With a central hub for dissemination came experimentation-on a site-wide ‘opposite day,’ one user drew a face, surprised at its own new hopefulness, saying, “Everything went better than expected!” That face burrowed its way into popularity through iteration in the same way the first did-soon other faces were drawn, deemed wonderful, and copied-and so we have, a rage comic creation tool that functions also as a canon of faces. Subreddits nest within the main site-go to /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu (“F7U12”) to find recently uploaded comics, ordered by popularity in the form of “up-votes,” of which each user has one per comic. Reddit-either the front-page or the filth-foundry of the internet-created a subreddit devoted to these comics. This is the monument of rage comics: readings build and build comics stack up, one upon the other and millions of readers, set in front of screens, become passive storytellers, each with his or her own personal constellation of past readings, which informs the understanding of each new comic. For while one’s experience of the face is partly dictated by its lines, it’s determined more so by each reader’s past experience of the face.

And it grew its very own audience, transforming all who saw it into a unique author of rage. Others loved it they made their own four-panel comics, each ending with the same image.

Sometime in 2008, an anonymous author posted a four-panel comic to the website .