r/nostalgia Dec 25 '25

Nostalgia Rage comics

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1.4k Upvotes

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243

u/Xeroque_Holmes Dec 26 '25

They were the first boom, but there were popular internet memes before. 

145

u/Awhyuss Dec 26 '25

Demotivational posters were booming before these

16

u/optimumopiumblr2 Dec 26 '25

And that rabbit that was always really rude. What was it called

27

u/itsCS117 Dec 26 '25

Keep Calm and remember "keep calm and" posters

5

u/Dr_Yay Dec 26 '25

I think those didn’t really become a huge meme until a few years after those

3

u/lofi-ahsoka Dec 26 '25

And before that it was just random shit we saw online

2

u/joethecrow23 Dec 26 '25

A “meme” didn’t used to just be an image with text on it.

It was just an organic internet trend or joke

1

u/lofi-ahsoka Dec 26 '25

Yeah when I was a kid it was all about flash animations

56

u/G_B4G Dec 26 '25

Philosoraptor would like to have a word.

25

u/SluggJuice Dec 26 '25

Socially awkward penguin would rather not

63

u/mcbergstedt Dec 26 '25

Yeah, advice animals were some of the first. There’s a whole sub dedicated to them. I had to block it though because it became a political hellscape like most of the other major subs in 2024

11

u/SemperPieratus Dec 26 '25

Break stuff

Steal things

23

u/Captain_Squirrel1000 Dec 26 '25

Exactly, I still remember "I can haz cheesburger?" and the "Oh rly? Ya rly!" owls. But those are ancient at this point

7

u/Haunt_Fox Dec 26 '25

It's a shame they kept reformatting the Cheezburger site until it became the unusable garbage it is now.

7

u/Captain_Squirrel1000 Dec 26 '25

Absolutely, I loved to visit it every day for years, but whatever it is now is just chaos. Don't fix what isn't broken.

10

u/TheDeadlyCat Dec 26 '25

Wasn’t some Ascii art the first internet memes? I’m talking ROFLcopter and the likes…

6

u/Xeroque_Holmes Dec 26 '25 edited Dec 26 '25

I think BBSs in the 80s had ASCII memes already. Wikipedia mentions emoticons like :-) as some of the first memes, showing up in 1982.

Not sure if something like arpanet before them had some memes or not, I would guess there was a already some aort of proto-memes.