Me Gusta

Origin¶

Me Gusta was drawn by illustrator May Oswald, who published as Matt at the time, and first posted on March 18, 2010 simultaneously across 4chan, Reddit, Tumblr and DeviantArt. It debuted attached to a four-panel comic the artist made specifically to demonstrate how the face was meant to be used, showing a cat’s reaction to being petted. The drawing itself is deliberately ugly: a wide, lopsided grin stretched too far across the face, eyes pinched, rendered in the crude MS Paint line that defined the whole rage-comic library.

What it means¶

“Me gusta” is Spanish for “I like it.” In its earliest use the face conveyed a narrow and faintly transgressive kind of pleasure — enjoyment of something the character clearly knows is not normal. The meaning broadened quickly to cover any guilty pleasure: being disturbed and satisfied at once. That is the whole comic engine. The strained smile does not say “this is nice,” it says “I am aware this is wrong and I am enjoying it anyway,” and the discomfort of the drawing is what sells it.

Spread¶

The face was absorbed into the shared rage-comic vocabulary within months, appearing in thousands of strips on Tumblr, Memebase, FunnyJunk and Reddit’s /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu, the subreddit that served as the format’s centre of gravity. A dedicated Me Gusta Face blog launched in December 2010 to curate them, and by May 2012 the character had climbed to the top tier of Memegenerator’s rankings. Its standard use was terminal: the final panel, after a gross, awkward or embarrassing payoff, with nothing following it.

The rage-comic library functioned like a shared font. A small set of faces — perhaps a dozen in heavy rotation — could be copied freely between strips, so a reader who learned Me Gusta in one comic understood it instantly in the next, regardless of who drew it. That standardisation is what let thousands of people make comics with no drawing ability whatsoever, and it is also why individual creators were so rarely credited.

Variants¶

The face spawned a small family of modified versions:

• No Me Gusta — the same features rearranged into awkward distaste, for things the character does not like.
• Me Gusta Mucho — a broader, more delighted grin for extreme satisfaction.
• Bubbles No Me Gusta — the expression drawn onto Bubbles from The Powerpuff Girls, one of many character mashups.

Legacy¶

Me Gusta is a staple of the classic rage-face set alongside Rage Guy, Trollface, Forever Alone, Cereal Guy and Yao Ming Face. The comics themselves largely died out around 2013, displaced by reaction GIFs and screenshots that required no drawing at all. The face survived that extinction because the expression is genuinely good: there is still no faster way to draw the specific feeling of enjoying something you probably should not admit to, and it gets reposted both sincerely and as a deliberate throwback to the era that produced it. The face also escaped comics entirely, appearing as a standalone reply image on forums and in early Facebook comment threads.