rage comic

noun

A short cartoon strip using a growing set of pre-made cartoon faces which usually express rage or some other simple emotion or activity.

Meanings

nounrage comic (plural rage comics)

plural rage comics

  1. InternetA short cartoon strip using a growing set of pre-made cartoon faces which usually express rage or some other simple emotion or activity.

    Rage comics were first introduced to China as bàozŏu mànhuà […] in 2008, and have become increasingly popular among Chinese Internet users since then.

    2017, Aaron Marcus, Masaaki Kurosu, Xiaojuan Ma, Ayako Hashizume, Cuteness Engineering: Designing Adorable Products and Services, Springer, →ISBN, page 70
    4 more examples

    Last week, Reddit user CappnPoopdeck posted a "rage comic" depicting a man who, as a joke, takes an unused pregnancy test left behind by his ex-girlfriend, then finds that the test comes back positive.

    2012 November 7, Hilary Hanson, “Man Takes Pregnancy Test, Finds Out He Has Testicular Cancer: Reports”, in HuffPost, archived from the original on 30 Apr 2023

    He added, “Obama is a smart guy. ‘Okay, so this is how that works, so I type in that name, or now that I’m on Google+, I type in a +, or now that I’m on Reddit, put in a rage comic because that’s funny.’”

    2013, James E[verett] Katz, Michael Barris, Anshul Jain, The Social Media President: Barack Obama and the Politics of Digital Engagement, Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN, page 99

    Thus, in order to produce and understand LOLCats, users need to master LOLspeak; to create a rage comic, the user requires familiarity with a broad range of new symbols.

    2014, Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series), Cambridge, Mass.; London: The MIT Press, →ISBN, page 118

    A rage comic features a short sequence of the actions of standard characters and is often about the absurdity or folly of everyday life situations or comments on media occurrences.

    2015, Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, editor, Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, 3rd edition, Information Science Reference, →ISBN, page 3772
Cite this entry
APA

rage comic. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/rage%20comic

MLA

“rage comic.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/rage%20comic. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “rage comic,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/rage%20comic.

Source: rage comic on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.