“To be honest, the type of people who like using that image are the people I don’t want to talk to. “I didn’t even try and hold on to that copyright,” Green says.
#Randomish meme comics series
In 2006, he published a comic for his series Horribleville in which a character draws an anthropomorphic phallus and names it “Dick Butt.” The image of Dick Butt went viral in certain circles and Green quickly lost control of it. It also didn’t hurt that Green had already learned from past mistakes. He says the trick is vigilance, luck, and not being afraid to steal from your thieves. What makes Green’s story different from those of folks like Furie is that he has, astoundingly enough, been able to harness the meme’s success for profit and greater recognition, and is surprisingly renowned as its creator. Across social media, we see him sitting in a burning room with a dumb smile on his face, musing to himself, “This is fine.” It’s a simple, potent image that captures the tenor of our chaotic times and the reactions of those who refuse to accept awful reality, and it’s been used far and wide. The figure was initially named Question Hound but has since been dubbed the This Is Fine Dog. Another cartoonist, KC Green, similarly saw one of his characters meme-ified for political purposes.
Pepe is infamous, Furie is obscure, and the connection between the two has largely been severed.Īnd yet, there’s a counterexample that should inspire hope for anyone whose content has been ganked for the lulz. Furie has made noble efforts to stem the tide, from symbolically killing the character off to suing Alex Jones (they settled), but the damage is mostly done. The character was first conceived by cartoonist Matt Furie for his ongoing comics series Boy’s Club, but its visage, for whatever reason, started being used by members of various online forums, then became popular on 4chan, then became a leading icon of the alt-right and an Anti-Defamation League–identified hate symbol. You make something, it gets popular without credit, and you watch it slip through your grasp. The Escapist – Webcomics via Archive.It’s taken for granted that a meme, once set free, will never return to the cage of copyright and creator control. Encyclopedia Dramatica (via Wayback Machine) – Slackerz CADbortion (via Wayback Machine) – Seriously posted on EEGRA (via Wayback Machine) – Hilarity Comic posted on EEGRA (via Wayback Machine) – Gamer Comic posted on Explosm – Cyanide and Happiness posted on Similar to how anything with green and purple can be recognized as Daily Dose, any similar-looking four pane comic can be recognized as Loss. Usually, these would attempt to be minimalistic, portraying the characters as lines, dots, or just having four empty panels. Alternative/Minimalist InterpretationsĪlongside the outright mockery of the strip, a trend arose on /v/ which involved taking the Loss strip and representing it in different ways. On July 25th, 2009, YouTuber KennylovesArin uploaded a musical tribute based on the comic accompanied by friends Skraggy and Arin (popular animator known as Egoraptor), with lyrical references to the miscarriage strip. Someone went to the extent of making a random CAD comic generator, subtly mocking that even disjointed, mismatched panels of the comic are still funnier than the originals.Įl Santo (the webcomic overlook), The Bad Webcomic Wiki and others have also mentioned the infamous comic in negative reviews of the webcomic as well. Something Awful users were particularly unkind to the comic, creating mock threads (one of which is over 350 pages long), two entire (now closed) wikis and an interactive graph of the comic. On 4chan, the /v/ board became overrun with parodies to such an extent that moderators began banning people who opened new "Loss" threads. Other notable internet persona to mock the comic included as Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw of Zero Punctuation and Shmorky from Something Awful's Flash Tub. After the strip was posted, many notable webcomics began parodying the comic and its final panel in particular, including HijiNKS Ensue, Cyanide and Happiness, Bigger then Cheeses, EEGRA hilarity comics, Fanboys, and Slackerz.