Teen Comix / No Fear / One Fear

About

Teen Comix, also known as "No Fear / One Fear" is an exploitable comic strip popular on Tumblr in which a teen is seen walking with a shirt that reads "No Fear." In the second panel, he passes another person posing a humorous question or scenario, and then in the third, his shirt reads "One Fear."

Origin

On March 6th, 2015, webcomic Escape From Heaven by Branson Reese^[1] uploaded a strip called "Teen Comix." In the original, shown below, the second panel shows a shirt that reads "What if they made Simpsons porn illegal?" Despite the comic's wide spread as an exploitable, the original only has 379 notes as of February 8th, 2017.

Spread

A little over a year after he first posted the comic, Branson Reese tweeted^[2] the comic with the caption "This is the only pure thing I've ever created." The tweet, shown below, gained over 1,800 retweets and 3,900 likes.

This sparked new interest in the comic. Two days after Reese's tweet, the comic was uploaded to Imgur ^[3] with the caption "same" and gained over 2,100 views. By summer of 2016, the comic had started appearing as an exploitable, with some of the earliest variations replacing "simpsons porn" with "Hentai"^[4] and "Murder."^[5] Over the second half of 2016, several variations appeared, often linked to various subcommunities and fandoms. It began growing particularly popular on Tumblr in late 2016/early 2017. One of the most popular examples was posted on January 18th, when dahanci^[6] posted a Wholesome variation that gained over 15,000 notes (shown below).

Creator's Response

On March 2, 2018, Reese tweeted his support for the use of his comic as a meme format, going on to say that he only invoked copyright when the meme was used by large corporations.

On August 13 of the same year he posted screenshots of the tweets to his tumblr^[7] where he reiterated his stance:

Here’s my stance on the meme: I don’t give a shit; that bell’s never getting unrung. People still use that meme format three entire years later, I’m not expecting it to go anywhere anytime soon. Sometimes they credit me and that’s nice but usually they don’t and who fucking cares?

The thing I do hate is when people make money off of it. That objectively sucks. I never see any of that money. I’ve filed so many DMCA notices and it works maybe 20% of the time. Fuck RedBubble in particular.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References