Flork of Cows

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About

Flork of Cows is an online four-panel webcomic series memorable for its MS-Paint drawn sock puppet characters. Over the years, it has grown popular thanks in part to several popular strips, including the one that inspired Hey Man, You See That Guy Over There?

History

The webcomic Flork of Cows debuted on Wordpress on January 21st, 2012^[1] with crudely drawn MS paint comics (early examples shown below). The comic began being posted on Facebook and Reddit in 2016.

The webcomic is known for its usage of sock puppets often in grotesque, absurd, surreal, violent, existentialist, and/or cringe humor. The webcomic utilizes a plethora of running jokes such as the Anti-weeb crusader, Julius Caesar, Ung the cave-sock puppet, Charlie the 'Tago'-loving sock, and Mage wizards. The first Flork of Cows webcomic to use the sock puppet characters was posted on March 19th, 2016 (shown below).

Online Presence

The Facebook page Florkofcows was created on March 19th, 2016, and has garnered 173,000 followers.^[2] The private group of the same name has around 11.5K members. The subreddit /r/FlorkofCowsOfficial^[3] was created on June 13th, 2017, and has 35.2k members. The artist's Twitter account has over 78,000 followers.^[4] A TV Tropes page^[1] is dedicated to the artist.

Hey Man You See That Guy Over There

On April 25th, 2017, the Facebook page Florkofcowsofficial posted the original "Hey Man" comic, featuring an MS paint illustration of a sock puppet saying "Hey man you see that guy over there / He thinks Sword Art Online is the best anime ever" (shown below). The strip was employed as a Things I Don't Like webcomic, as people used it as a format to mock people with unpopular opinions.

Flork Bento Cakes

The 'bento cakes' refers to a Japanese-inspired name, “bentô” (or obentô), which is a lunch box or an individual portion of take-out food, that went viral in Latin American countries in 2021 when people started to add Flork memes as a cake decoration. For example, this Peruvian company @sorprendelima shared a video on TikTok showing a bento cake with a Flork character on it on December 4th, 2021, receiving over 169,000 views and 6,000 likes in almost a year (shown below).

The Flork cakes drew the attention of Brazilian social media in early 2022. As a result, bakers in Brazil were flooded with bento cake requests^[5] and continued generating viral videos, such as a May 30th, 2022 TikTok by @amandaadoces that received 11 million views in three months, showing the creation process of the bento cake.

In other LatAm countries, the trend is popularly called lunch box cake, and also has a great share of users posting their best Flork cakes on social media. For example, a "happy birthday" cake (video below) made by @dulcepastelcartagena on April 14th, 2022, received 800,000 views in five months.

Explosive Reactive Armor

Explosive Reactive Armor (ERA) refers to a type of reactive armor for military vehicles, predominantly used for tanks and armored personnel carriers (APC), that breaks up a competing projectile upon impact in order to protect the vehicle from being penetrated and keep the crew inside safe. ERA became the subject of memes and internet discourse in 2022 and 2023 amid the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, eventually leading to the use of Flork of Cows characters dressed like two Ukrainian soldiers that were portrayed putting ERA on any object. The memes became prevalent on Reddit's /r/NonCredibleDefense sub and 4chan's /k/ board.