Winged Doom / Welcome to Omsk!

About

Winged Doom/The Omsk Bird is a series of drawings, comics and image macros, originated in 2009 on Russian imageboards, based on a central character of "Winged Doom", a drawing by Heiko Muller. The character is often associated with the city of Omsk, and everything psychedelic, surreal and drug-induced.

Origin

Omsk, a city in Russia, started seeing use in memes in 2009, starting on 0chan.ru/b. The phrase “Омич полуёбок, скажи ты наркоман? я просто тоже где то там живу, могли бы вместе уёбывать наркотики” (“Hey, half-fucker guy from Omsk, tell me, are you a junkie? Because I live here somewhere too, we could shoot drugs together”) was often repeated on the forum, and the word Омич (guy from Omsk) quickly became a euphemism for junkie. Ultimately, this led Omsk itself to become associated with everything drug-induced or surreal. Various image macros started to appear with “Welcome to Omsk” written on top of some surreal pictures like in “Picture unrelated.” One of these image macros featured the painting “Winged doom” by Heiko Müller (shown below).

The recognizable central figure was dubbed “Omsk bird” and started to appear in fan art. Heiko Müller became aware of the trend, initially misinterpreting it as if Omsk citizens have chosen it as a city mascot, but ultimately figured out the joke. The final version of stylized winged doom icon that is used in memegenerator was made by Heiko himself (he changed eye color from red to white).

Spread

Become popular as an image macro series with bird's head and using puns. The group on the Russian-language social networking site Vk.com has reached more than 113,000 followers as of May 2015.^[1]

The character ultimately became notable in the Polandball meme community.^[2]

Various Examples

External References