The imageboard largely credited as the source of rage comics is 4chan.
The earliest rage comic is generally traced to 4chan’s /b/ “Random” board in 2008. It was a simple four-panel cartoon about an embarrassing bathroom mishap, ending with the exaggerated face and text associated with Rage Guy. Other users quickly copied, altered, and recombined the format.
Rage comics used crude drawings and a growing library of recognizable faces to express everyday frustrations, surprise, triumph, and awkwardness. Their simplicity made them easy to create in Microsoft Paint or similar programs, while the repeated faces worked almost like a shared visual vocabulary.
The format spread widely in the early 2010s through sites including Reddit, Cheezburger, 9GAG, and other meme communities. A common mix-up is crediting later platforms with inventing rage comics: Reddit helped popularize them, but the origin is largely attributed to 4chan. Individual faces could have separate creators; for example, artist Carlos Ramirez created Trollface in 2008, but that does not make him the creator of rage comics as a whole.