Countryballs

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Countryballs, also known as Polandball,^[a] is a geopolitical satirical art style, genre, and Internet meme, predominantly used in online comics strips in which countries or political entities are personified as balls^[b] with eyes, decorated with their national flags. Comics feature the characters in various scenarios, generally poking fun at national stereotypes, international relations, and historical events, with the balls moving about by walking or jumping. Other common features in Countryball strips include non-English countries speaking in broken English — with vocabularies of their national languages included — political incorrectness, and black comedy. Strips are generally created using Microsoft Paint or more advanced graphic art software, often made to intentionally look crudely drawn.

Countryballs date back to an August 2009 incident on drawball.com, where thousands of Polish Internet users swarmed the website to transform the illustration into the Polish flag (a literal "Poland ball"). However, Falco, a British user of the German imageboard Krautchan.net, is often credited with creating the modern Countryballs comic format. This user created the first countryball comic strips to ridicule Polish Internet troll Wojak, who used broken English on the same board. Falco created the strips using Microsoft Paint in September 2009 and posted them to Krautchan, where they gained popularity among other users on the board, particularly Russians. The meme gained further notoriety following the death of Lech Kaczyński, president of Poland, in the Smolensk air disaster in April 2010.

Countryballs continue to be popular on the Internet, with the Facebook community reaching over 215,000 members by July 2015,^[1] and the subreddit r/Polandball reaching over 650,000 by 2024. Several other communities are active on VK, Telegram, YouTube, Twitter, and Bilibili. It has also been the subject of research by various institutions, as well as positive and negative commentary for both their simplistic and offensive nature, with some feeling they could allow readers to learn about unknown events. Various video games and alternate history works have been based on the meme.

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