On Monday, May 18, 2015, a thread on /b/ argued that Pepe the Frog was becoming outdated and asked what the next meme should be. Pepe had been the board's mascot for the better part of seven years; anons were, half-seriously, looking for what came next.

At 13:33:46 an anon posted a 954×531 Microsoft Paint drawing of a wolf — a triangle head, two dot eyes, one long snout, arms that don't quite work — with the caption:

>and on this day wofl was inventend

Two typos in five words. Both are now canon.

Within four minutes the thread had answered:

Time	Post	Content
13:33:46	No.616485680	the drawing — "and on this day wofl was inventend"
13:34:32	No.616485807	an image: a crude red stamp reading SEAL OF QUALITY — do not distribute
13:35:44	No.616485980	>>616485680 "seems dumb enough, I can get behind this"
13:37:39	No.616486305	>>616485680 >>616485980 "Agreed. I'm on board with this"

Know Your Meme's archived screenshot of the thread shows the original post quoted by sixteen different replies as it ran. Nobody signed anything. Nobody claimed anything. The name on every post is Anonymous.

Know Your Meme added the entry the same evening (May 18, 2015, 8:00 PM EDT, submitted by user "wofl1") and classified it as an exploitable, origin 4chan, year 2015. Its tags tell the story of the derivatives: wofl, woofle, waffle, wofle, wolfe, wolf, pepe, exploitable.

Anons drew their own. Wofl got a seal of quality, a newspaper ("daily meme: pepe market destroyed after arrival of dank new meme"), a subreddit, and a gallery on KYM that reached 93 images. It was drawn badly by many hands, which is the only way a meme with no artist can grow.

The KYM entry was last updated May 7, 2016. Then wofl went quiet.

>source: knowyourmeme.com/memes/wofl

Pepe did not become outdated in 2015. He became one of the biggest memes in the history of the internet, and in 2023 a token carrying his face — no team, no utility, a community-made 4chan frog — became one of the largest memecoins in existence.

That is not a problem for the wofl story. It is the wofl story. Pepe proved that a meme belongs to the community that redraws it, not to the person who drew it first.

So wofl never got its moment — but crypto gives old internet memes entirely new lives, and a decade later the original narrative reads differently: a meme whose creation story is literally "what comes after Pepe?" is a meme built for exactly this question.

Pepe was drawn by an artist. The internet made him what he is: anonymous posters, shitposters and communities produced thousands of variations and gave the character a life far beyond the original comic. The meme became bigger than the artist because the community carried it.

Wofl takes that idea to its end point. There is no famous artist to worship. There is no polished origin story. There is an anonymous 4chan user, Microsoft Paint, and a deliberately terrible drawing of a wolf. That is about as internet-native as it gets — and it means there is nobody to defer to, nobody to wait on, and nobody who can take it away.

>no artist. no owner. no fees. just wofl.