The way to look at rage comics is as a lost opportunity. They started with nowhere to go but up. The original rage comic was a 4-panel about pooping. Slowly, they started developing a language - there were variations on faces, there were shorthands, there was grammar. It was well on the way towards being an ideogrammatical shorthand. Then the artists started getting into it - if you look at the panel above, it's the equivalent of calligraphy. Then the generators appeared and the art went away. It became a format for 12 year olds to gripe about being twelve. The cartoon above is just about the high water mark for rage cartoons. It was a short run. By the time Dante drew this nobody even recognized the trollface anymore because the art had died. The image above is maybe 5 years old.
I like them because they're essentially a (assumably unconscious, though maybe less so, who knows) folk revival of Commedia Dell'arte. Troll face is a dead ringer for the Harlequin, with the main Character being a sort of mash up of Pierrot, Il Capitano, and Scaramouche depending on the context. I think it's fascinating. Someone who's smarter than I am should write a paper about it.
Thanks KB. Maybe I'll write an article about it over the summer.
As kb mentioned, though, aren't these caricatures sort of a dying art? what can I add to the conversation by talking about them now? Or is that all the more reason to talk about them? I'm of two minds on the subject.
Archaeologists talk about nothing but the distant past and still get publications. Go for it. Personally, rage comics will hold a special place in my heart because it was the first internet language I learned. There are other ones now, for example, reddit has it's own preferred vocabulary/grammar that has nothing to do with english. I feel like meta-language is too snobby a term for it, but it captures the idea well enough I think.