Pepe the Frog Is Dead: Creator Kills the White Supremacist-Hijacked Icon
After fighting an uphill battle to reclaim the feel-good image of his popular character after it was perverted by a culture of hate, cartoonist Matt Furie laid to rest Pepe the Frog in Fantagraphics’ Free Comic Book Day offering, “World’s Greatest Cartoonists.” In a one-page strip, Pepe lies in an open casket while “Boy’s Club” friends Landwolf, Brett and Andy mourn him in their irreverent fashion.
Furie debuted Pepe and the “Boy’s Club” characters on his MySpace blog in 2005 and published four issues of the crew’s adventures through Buenaventura Press, stories that were collected into a single volume by Fantagraphics in 2016. Pepe, as seen in “Boy’s Club,” is a mellow dude getting stoned with his friends, regularly engaging in gross-out humor. But more recently, Pepe has been adopted as an icon and mascot by the extreme conservative “alt-right” movement, and as memes showing the chill frog promoting white nationalist and anti-semitic messages graduated from 4chan and Reddit into the mainstream, the Anti-Defamation League last year designated Pepe a hate symbol.
Pepe had starred in more innocent memes for years, his “Feels good, man” mantra applicable to all manner of situations. But as detailed by the Daily Beast, this began to change in 2015 thanks to a coordinated campaign on a subversive corner of 4chan. A self-identified white nationalist told the Daily Beast that, “We basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda, etc. We built that association.” When, later, Pepe was used in images promoting Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency, the memes served both as a coded message to the “alt-right” subculture and, through exposure of their version of Pepe to mainstream audiences, an amplification of the group’s more extreme content.
http://www.cbr.com/pepe-frog-creator-kills-white-supremacist-icon/
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