Like the images, you can resize and reposition it. Clicking will insert a text-editing box into your currently selected panel. To insert labels and dialogue, click the button labeled Standard at the top middle of Rage Maker. To move it around inside the panel, grab it anywhere else and drag it. Drag some faces into the panels, then grab the square in the lower right corner of the inserted face to resize it. Browse through the available faces by clicking the menu on the left side that says Neutral, which is just one of dozens of sets of faces sporting expressions. The tool allows you to import images and draw with your mouse, but it is easier to start with a dialogue between two clip-art heads. Rage Maker will start you off with a blank four-panel strip. Go to, one of several browser-based rage comic editing and publishing tools. You might already have an idea for a rage comic of your own. In another, a father is enjoying time with his daughter when the girl asks, ''Daddy, why are you so ugly?'' The father's response: His eyes spurt bright blue tears. In one strip, the author tries to nudge a ladybug off his car's windshield by flicking his wipers, only to smear the hapless insect across the glass. The best stories are those that could happen to anyone. It is not that the woman's friend said she needed to go on a diet that is painfully funny, it is that she is stuck with friends like these. Readers identify with the author's frustration at being forced to deal with mundane inanities. But where Doonesbury characters typically react with wisecracking aplomb, rage comic characters respond with - well, rage. Like Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strips, there is usually a punch line after the punch line in which the author reacts to the situation. They are more like a Bob Newhart sketch: The laughs come not from replaying the public foolishness of some stranger, but from watching the awkward reaction of the observer, who almost always appears as a character in the strip. In that way, rage comics are not like the average viral YouTube video. The last panel typically features the author, represented by a standard clip-art illustration, either screaming, fuming, throwing up hands in exasperation, or a collapsed-potato face sighing, ''OK.''
Most strips focus on some small moment, a true-life anecdote, that sent the author spinning into inexplicable fury or burrowing deep into resignation to keep from exploding. There are other sites, like 9gag, that feature rage comics, but Reddit's f7u12 readers have set a high bar for both originality - within the genre's limits - and for cruel funniness that rewards making fun of oneself instead of others.Įven if a strip is about something inane the guy in line at McDonald's said, the punch line isn't the gaffe, but the author's confused, awkward reaction, represented by one of several clip-art characters whose what-the-heck expressions of exasperation have punctuated thousands and thousands of others' strips.
This is a reflection of how adults talk in the real world.) But the swearing and bodily functions aren't for shock value, as in an episode of South Park. (This brings up another trait of rage comics: profanity and vulgarity abounds. The best place to do that is a section of Reddit, known as '' f7u12.'' Since its founding in 2008, it has grown to about 500-1,000 comics posted each day and read by up to a quarter million people daily. The best way to understand rage comics is to read a couple of dozen of them. What holds the genre together is a combination of browser-based editing tools that encourage authors to stick to a predefined set of images and text styles, and websites where readers can ''upvote'' strips to the top of the slush pile. Despite the growing number of cartoonists, rage comics have maintained a consistent recognisable style: stock art of faces, some twisted in rage or frustration. It is just the first woman's face - alone, weary and resigned to her friend's vapidity. ''I don't think so,'' the other replies, ''but I'm glad you finally realized that you need to start a diet!'' The stark fourth panel has no dialogue. One asks the other if she has read The Hunger Games books. Popular themes are public embarrassment, private shame in the bedroom or bathroom, and most of all, the unbearable burden of dealing with other people's stupidity.įor example: Two female heads on a white background are talking.