>>82394830>>82397898>>82414459>>82416462Essentially this.
They started as little 4-panel (or more) slice-of-life/observational comics with simple stick figure doodles in MSPaint. They either started on /v/ or /b/.
The punchline of every comic was a hyper-detailed face exaggeratedly expressing the emotion associated with the comic's events. Every comic was drawn individually, every face was drawn specifically for each comic, by the artist who drew it.
That's why 4chan got so fucking mad about Reddit "stealing" the joke in the form of "F7U12" or whatever they called it. If Reddit just stole the same comics, or the general joke of making slice-of-life comics ending with zoom-in face punchlines, it would be okay. But instead, they simply cropped the punchline reaction faces and pasted them all over existing comics to make "rage face" comics, which is just lazy, tactless, unoriginal, unfunny, and kind of pathetic.
An analogy:
>Talking to coworkers by the water cooler>"So a baker invites a wealthy client into his family-run bakery to show him the progress on a particularly large cake the client ordered for an investor presentation. 'It's huge!' says the client, 'Enormous, massive, even bigger than I expected! This is perfect, above and beyond what I asked! What's with the white cloth design though?" The baker answers reluctantly while looking at the floor: 'The cake's in the back. That's my wife.'">Water cooler coworkers laughing to tears>Coworker X in nearby cubicle overhears>Sends an e-mail>"Hey Sharon, THE CAKE'S IN THE BACK, THAT'S MY WIFE LOLOLOL">Meets other coworkers>Haha you think that's a good one? THE CAKE'S IN THE BACK, THAT'S MY WIFE!>Shouting over cubicles>HAHA HEY DOUG, YEAH HEY, THE CAKE'S IN THE BACK, THAT'S MY WIFE!>No one knows the origin of cake/wife, they think it's just some lolsorandom quip, they all mass e-mail it to each other and their colleagues>Oh man coworker X, where did you get that?>"I totally came up with it myself!" 
