A brief history of the Rage Comic

While most of the web is text-based, there are some burrows and sites that prize images above all else. Imageboards (like forums, but for silly pictures) are incredibly popular with the younger web demographic and Imgur, a frighteningly simple image uploading site, gets traffic in the millions each month. Thus, it’s not surprising that users would create ways to tell stories with images. 4chan, an imageboard that is really the cesspool of the Internet, has spawned thousands of memes (which we’ll cover later) and there might not be one more important that rage comics.

Rage comics are like cave drawings for the socially inept/technologically trained/lives in Mom’s basement classic board users out there. These easy to read and user-created comics tell stories that can be long, short, stupid, hilarious or even touching.

Simple, hilarious and relatable.

Ever since they were birthed on 4chan, rage comics have found homes on every meta-web site. There’s an entry at Know Your Meme (a meme encyclopedia), Wikipedia (a regular encyclopedia) and a hugely popular community at Reddit (not an encyclopedia). Why are rage comics so popular? It’s simple. They’re simple! Each comic is four panels (give or take the newest batch which tells loooooong stories), which caters to the microsecond-long attention span of KIDS THESE DAYS. In addition, all rage comics are essentially relegated to using one of 40 faces. The FFFUUUUUUU face in the above comic was the original “rage” face and, of course, users have broadened the horizons and created more!

This is like 20% of the acceptable faces.

With so many customizable parts and an unending stream of weird stories, rage comics have become an easy and accepted way to recount stories on this vast sea of a web. And thank god for that. How else would we know what REALLY HAPPENED at the moon landing?

Neil is such a trickster.

Reddit saves an orphanage

It all started with a machete to the face.

On January 27th, a user by the name of TheLake posted a picture of orphanage worker Anthony Omari, who had been attacked by bandits while defending his orphanage in Kenya. The orphanage housed 35 children and some administrators, plus TheLake, who was interning there. TheLake proposed raising $2,000 to fix the orphanage’s wall so intruders could no longer rob the place/stab people in the face. What came next would surprise even the most jaded individual…

By 6 am the next morning, Reddit had raised over $11,000 for the orphanage enough for the strongest cement wall and coils of barbed wire, according to an incredulous TheLake. At this point, the story had made its way through the Twittersphere, been splashed across newspapers and probably scuttled through an eerie and desolate Myspace. Donations kept pouring in and eventually TheLake diverted the rest of the cash flow to the Longonot Education Initiative.

While Reddit and online donations are pretty generous in their concept, this story blows all expectations out of the water.

I’ll be your guide, Kristian Mundahl

WARNING: PLEASE KEEP HANDS AND FEET INSIDE THE BLOG AT ALL TIMES.

Welcome to Internet College, where I take the weird, witty, wondrous and worldly internet culture and compress it into a simple blog post. Each week, I’ll be focusing on a certain topic, like memes, viral videos, hashtags or Omegle, and translating it into something even the most cyberphobic people can pretend to enjoy. The bevy of videos and pictures dumped in this impressive series of tubes will ensure a proper multimedia experience and will CERTAINLY leave you wanting more.