Trollface / Coolface / Problem?

In his deviantART post, Whynne claims he was attempting to draw a comic character known as “Rape Rodent”:

Spread

Trollface has also been called “coolface”, which came from a comic posted to 4chan after the original trollface:

The coolface comic was posted to Ebaumsworld^[2] on November 30th, 2008. The first Urban Dictionary^[3] definition for “trollface” was posted on August 1st, 2009.

Derivatives using the face can be found on Tumblr^[4], Memebase^[5], and in rage comics in the f7u12^[6] subreddit. A Facebook^[7] fan page has over 96,000 ‘likes’ as of July 18th, 2011.

Search

Search queries did not pick up until January of 2009, several months after the original deviantArt posting.

Whynne Claims Copyright Infringement

On July 16th, 2011, a screenshot of an email from a man named Carlos Ramirez claiming to be Whynne was posted to Reddit.^[8] The email stated that the use of Trollface on Reddit violated his copyright on the image, and that he would like to have the subreddit removed.

The email was reposted to f7u12^[10] in a thread titled “Looks like f7u12 is done”. A Redditor named Whynne^[9] reponded to the thread saying:

You know what also makes me happy? Trolling reddit and seeing a shitstorm like this develop.

The background image for the f7u12 pages was changed to a picture of trollface with the text “HEY WHYNNE… U MAD BRO?”:

Derivatives

External References

^[1]Deviant Art – Comic Trolls / 9/19/08

^[2]Ebaumsworld – Cool Face

^[3]Urban Dictionary – Trollface

^[4]Tumblr – #trollface

^[5]Memebase – Troll Face

^[6]Reddit – f7u12

^[7]Facebook- Trollface

^[8]Reddit – Whynne, creator of “trollface,” calls for it to be removed from reddit for distasteful use

^[9]Reddit – Whynne

^[10]Reddit – Looks like f7u12 is done