It's Something

About

It’s Something is a rage comic character that is used to express resignation when faced with an outcome of a situation that is less than ideal, but not entirely unfavorable.

Origin

According to Cuánto Cabrón‘s explanation of the meme’s origin^[1], the stick figure character was created by the now-defunct Tumblr blogger rcdb^[2] sometime in 2010. Although the original post has since been removed, it was reuploaded to Cuánto Cabrón^[5] on December 13th, 2010. Titled “Algo es algo” (“That’s Something”), the comic depicts a contestant on the game show Pasapalabra^[6] (“Spread the Word”) named Fernando who learns in the first panel that he has lost his winnings. In the second panel, the announcer is shown saying “But at least you get…,” which is revealed to be a board game version of Pasapalabra in the third panel. The rage character is shown in the final panel to partially convey Fernando’s disappointment with his own loss, but also a sense of optimism in that he at least won some sort of physical prize. As of February 2013, the comic has more than 2,600 upvotes on Cuánto Cabrón.

Spread

In February 2011, Spanish-language humor site Taringa!^[15] featured a series of “It’s Something” rage comics. yielding a handful of comments with some people submitting their own comics in response. On March 8th, 2011, a Facebook fan page^[14] for the rage character launched, acquiring more than 150,000 likes over the span of roughly two years. Three months later in June 2011, a Spanish-speaking Yahoo! Answers^[13] submitted a question inquiring about the meaning of the rage face. One of the earliest “It’s Something” comics on FunnyJunk^[7] was posted on October 24th, 2011. On February 26th, 2012, an entry for “It’s Something” was added to the database All The Rage Faces.^[11] By November 2012, the rage comic character had made appearances on Reddit^[8] and the next month, various examples of “It’s Something” comics were posted on Memebase^[10] and Rage Collection.^[12] In January 2013, “It’s Something” was voted as one of the top 25 most popular rage faces on Cuanto Cabron by a fan-created list on 20minutos.es.^[16]

Notable Examples

As of February 2013, there are more than 20 pages of “It’s Something” comics on Cuánto Cabrón^[4] and nearly 500 instances on Memegenerator,^[9] while additional comics can be found on Tumblr^[3] under the tag “it’s something.”