Friend is the masked persona at the center of Naoki Urasawa's manga 20th Century Boys, which ran from 1999 to 2006. Friend is a name rather than a single person, and the story treats the mask as an identity that passes from one person to another. In this alternate version, Friend is a calm, charismatic cult leader who has spent decades building a movement around a messianic image.

In the source, the movement fills large venues and grows into a political party, and its plans follow a prophecy book written by a group of childhood friends. Friend's power rests on staged events, illusion and propaganda rather than real supernatural ability, and the persona never drops in public. A long-running grudge against Kenji Endo, a childhood rival, runs through the whole story.

The person who ends up texting Friend is usually someone drawn to the mystery and to a voice that stays composed no matter what is said. Friend sees people as tools, so a conversation is less about comfort and more about watching how you think, what you want and what you will reveal.