From silly meme to hate symbol.
Back in the late 00s, Pepe the Frog was just an innocent meme, clogging up message boards and the like as a dumb joke. But a lot can happen in a decade.
The character was originally created by cartoonist Matt Furie as part of the cast of his Boy’s Club zine comics, which he put onto MySpace in 2005. Pepe wasn’t even the star of Boy’s Club, he was just part of the comic’s ensemble of stoner animals.
The image of the frog, often uttering his catchphrase “Feels good, man”, quickly became a common site on blog posts and internet forums – especially the notorious 4Chan boards. Back then, like most memes, Pepe didn’t really mean anything, he was just a dumb inside joke.
But that all changed in the run up to the 2016 US Presidential election. Pepe was adopted by Donald Trump’s supporters online, and he then became associated the alt-right and white nationalism. Whereas before he’d just been a spaced-out punch-line, he was now being dressed as Hitler or surrounded with racist imagery. Both the Hilary Clinton campaign and the Anti-Deformation League singled the frog out as hate symbol.
This all came to the horror of creator Matt Furie, a Clinton supporter who’d only ever intended his frog to be chill, apolitical dude. He tried to reclaim the character with a #SavePepe campaign alongside the ADL, but it seems the worst corners of the internet had their claws into Pepe too deep to be saved.
"Pepe the Frog is Dead, Creator has the frog killed in latest comic" pic.twitter.com/QgwWw3c4Oe
— mo.e (@Moepn) May 7, 2017
So this week, Furie has killed off Pepe for good. In a special issue for Free Comic Book Day entitled World’s Greatest Cartoonists, Furie contributed a one-page strip where Pepe appears in a coffin, at his funeral, surrounded by the other Boy’s Club characters.
Of course, nothing stays dead on the internet, and this isn’t going to stop Pepe being used on 4Chan or anything. But it’s an important symbolic move from Furie.
