![]() There was a six-panel comic page of Pepe taking a leak with his pants all the way down, and one of his roommates walks in on him. Serwer: How did it feel when Pepe turned into an internet meme?įurie: When it started out, it was just a thing that people would use on message boards. A lot of bodily humor.įor whatever reason, the Pepe the Frog guy was singled out and started to evolve into this whole internet thing. It just kind of expresses early 20-something hedonistic lifestyle, of just hanging out, playing pranks on each other, eating pizza, partying, that kind of thing. You know just at Kinkos, make copies of it.Įventually I did some independent publishing with it, and I did about four comics called Boy’s Club, and Pepe is kind of like, in the comic version of him, in my version of him, he’s just kind of an everyman frog, he lives with his three roommates, a dog, a bear and a wolf. Matt Furie: Pepe started in the early 2000s, I had just been drawing a lot of frog faces, and I came up with a frog character to be one of four characters in a comic book that I did called Boy’s Club, and it started off as a zine, I would just publish it just for my friends and associates and stuff. What follows is a slightly edited transcript of our conversation.Īdam Serwer: Who is Pepe the Frog and how did you come up with him? I spoke to him Tuesday afternoon about the origins of Pepe, and how he feels about his mellow cartoon frog becoming a favored image of Nazis and white supremacists. Reporters now often describe Pepe as a “white-nationalist symbol” rather than the “chill” and “good natured” frog he was intended to be.įurie lives in Los Angeles, where he works as an artist and illustrator, working on everything from magazines and record covers to clothing. The image, which introduces the group as The Deplorables, includes Pepe in a Donald Trump wig. tweeted out a modified image of the poster for the action movie The Expendables with prominent Trump supporters’ faces photoshopped onto those of the action stars. ![]() He was created by artist Matt Furie for a strip he started in 2005 called Boy’s Club, which Furie describes as a comic about life in your early 20s.īut reporters today are more likely to encounter Pepe’s smug visage in his latest incarnation, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes put it, people with “Nazi frog avatars” who are “tweeting about the Jews.”Īfter Hillary Clinton placed half of her rival Donald Trump’s supporters in a “basket of deplorables,” Donald Trump Jr. Tuesday morning Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign denounced a cartoon frog named Pepe.įor most of his lifespan as a meme on the internet, Pepe the Frog was a benign, if sometimes bawdy figure beloved by pop stars and teenagers alike. ![]()
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