An Interview With the 'This Is Fine' Guy 10 Years After He Changed the Internet Forever
Meet KC Green, the man behind the meme.
Before I became a hard-hitting politics blogger, my first very big kid job (internship) was blogging about internet memes and culture. This was in early 2016, when Twitter hit a fever pitch for reaction images, right before it careened face-first into obsessing over meme namesakes themselves (Ken Bone, Salt Bae, Hurt Bae, Bhad Bhabie, we didn’t start the fire).
It was in this job that I often stumbled upon the viral two-panel image of a dog trapped in a kitchen on fire, a very relevant meme about terrified complacency. It spoke to me, and many others, deeply. Yes, this is what the hellfire of the 24-hour news cycle felt like. But the meme itself was a comfort — a way to call attention to the absurdity a situation while bonding over the pain it brings.
Earlier this month, cartoonist KC Green’s comic “On Fire” behind the meme turned 10 years old, marking a near-decade of people commiserating over a dog trapped in a house fire. But despite its viral success, Green wishes that a better world existed — one where people wouldn’t need to find catharsis in a cartoon dog’s tragedy.
For the cartoon’s 10-year anniversary, Green and I chatted about how “On Fire” came to be, how the comic’s virality changed his relationship with his work, and what he’s learned about antidepressants and memes in the years since.
