Forever Alone

Origin

Forever Alone is considered one of the first major rage comic spin-off characters to be creater after the original Rage Guy , which first sprang up on 4chan in 2009. According to various sources, the original comic was uploaded in a thread titled "April Fools" by FunnyJunk user Azuul on May 28th, 2010 (shown below). While the original artist has not been confirmed, Dictionary.com [24] cites Dominic Vanner as the illustrator behind the character.

Spread

In early June 2010, another instance featuring a bachelor salaryman was posted on 4chan (shown below, left). On August 5th, 2010, Redditor L_E_G_E_N_D posted a Forever Alone rage comic titled "Prom FFFUUUU" [14] (shown below, right), receiving over 275 up votes and 70 comments prior to being archived. By September 2010, there were over 23,000 image results for "Forever Alone" on FunnyJunk [3] and over 50,000 on Tumblr . [4] On September 11th, single topic blog Forever Alone Comics [19] was launched to curate the growing collection of four-pane comics. On September 15th, the /r/foreveralone [23] subreddit was created, which received over 25,300 subscribers in the next three years. In early October, Forever Alone received mentions in several blogs, including Geekosystem [5] , Memebase [15] and Uproxx. [16] Meanwhile, the meaning of term "Forever Alone" gradually expanded from a rage comic reference to the more general statement of being alone. On February 13th, 2013, the International Business Times [22] published a slideshow of notable Valentine's Day Forever Alone comics and image macros . As of February 2013, a Facebook [21] page titled "Forever Alone" has received over 7.2 million submissions.