Comic character and Internet meme
Pepe the Frog ( ) is a comic character and Internet meme created by cartoonist Matt Furie. Designed as a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body, Pepe originated in Furie's 2005 comic "Boy's Club". The character became an Internet meme when his popularity steadily grew across websites such as Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan in 2008. By 2015, he had become one of the most popular memes used on 4chan and Tumblr. Different types of Pepe memes include "Sad Frog", "Smug Frog", "Angry Pepe", "Feels Frog", and "You will never..." Frog. Since 2014, "s" have been posted on the "meme market" as if they were trading cards.
Originally an apolitical character, Pepe was appropriated from 2015 to 2016 onward as a symbol of the alt-right movement. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) included Pepe in its hate symbol database in 2016, but said most instances of Pepe were not used in a hate-related context. Since then, Furie has expressed his dismay at Pepe being used as a hate symbol and has sued organizations for doing so.
In 2019, Pepe was used by protesters in the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. Despite being used in a political context, Pepe the Frog's use in Hong Kong is not perceived as being connected with alt-right ideology. Furie has welcomed the use of Pepe by Hong Kong protesters.
Origin: "Boy's Club".
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"My Pepe philosophy is simple: 'Feels good man.' It is based on the meaning of the word Pepe: 'To go Pepe'. I find complete joy in physically, emotionally, and spiritually serving Pepe and his friends through comics. Each comic is sacred, and the compassion of my readers transcends any differences, the pain, and fear of 'feeling good'."
–Matt Furie, 2015 interview with "The Daily Dot"
Pepe the Frog was created by American artist and cartoonist Matt Furie in 2005. Its usage as an Internet meme came from his comic "Boy's Club" #1. The progenitor of "Boy's Club" was a zine Furie made on Microsoft Paint called "Playtime", which included Pepe as a character. He posted his comic in a series of blog posts on Myspace in 2005.
In the comic, Pepe is seen urinating with his pants pulled down to his ankles and the catchphrase "feels good man" was his rationale. Furie took those posts down when the printed edition was published in 2006.
As an internet meme.
Pepe was used in blog posts on Myspace in 2005 and became an in-joke on Gaia Online. In 2008, the page containing Pepe and the catchphrase was scanned and uploaded to 4chan's /b/ board, which has been described as the meme's "permanent home".
The meme took off among 4chan users, who adapted Pepe's face and catchphrase to fit different scenarios and emotions, such as melancholy, anger, and surprise. "Feels bad, man", a sad variant of the frog's "feels good, man" catchphrase, also became associated with Pepe. Color was also added; originally a black-and-white line drawing, Pepe became green with brown lips, sometimes in a blue shirt. "Feels Guy", or "Wojak", originally an unrelated character typically used to express melancholy, was eventually often paired with Pepe in user-made comics or images.
The "sad frog" variation entered usage on Tumblr by 2012. That same year, the "Smug Pepe" variant emerged. Versions of the meme appeared on Chinese social media, such as Baidu Tieba, as early as 2014. There, it has been known as "shangxin qingwa" (傷心青蛙), or "sad frog". In 2014, images of Pepe were shared on social media by celebrities such as Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj. As Pepe became more widespread, 4chan users began referring to particularly creative and unique variants of the meme as "rare Pepes". These images, sometimes as physical paintings, were sold on eBay and posted on Craigslist. 4chan users referred to those who used the meme outside the website as "normies" (or "normalfags"). Users from 4chan, Reddit, and elsewhere attempted to prevent mainstream usage of the meme by "making Pepe as shocking as possible".
In 2015, Pepe was #6 on "Daily News and Analysis"'s list of the most important memes and the most retweeted meme on Twitter. The "Daily Intelligencer" called it Tumblr's "Biggest Meme of 2015". According to "Inverse", it was one of the most-reblogged memes on Tumblr in 2015.
Use by the alt-right.
As early as 2015, a number of Pepe variants were created by Internet trolls to associate the character with the alt-right movement. Some of the variants produced by this had Nazi Germany, Ku Klux Klan, or white power skinhead themes.
During the 2016 United States presidential election, the meme was connected to Donald Trump's campaign. In October 2015, Trump retweeted a Pepe representation of himself, associated with a video called "You Can't Stump the Trump (Volume 4)". Later in the election, Roger Stone and Donald Trump Jr. posted a parody movie poster of "The Expendables" on Twitter and Instagram titled "The Deplorables", a play on Hillary Clinton's controversial phrase "basket of deplorables", which included Pepe's face among those of members of the Trump family and other figures popular among the alt-right.
Also during the election, various news organizations reported associations of the character with white nationalism and the alt-right. In May 2016, Olivia Nuzzi of "The Daily Beast" wrote that there was "an actual campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies" and that "turning Pepe into a white nationalist icon" was an explicit goal of some on the alt-right. In August 2016, Clinton denounced the alt-right in a speech. During the speech, a 4chan user who was liveblogging the event on the site audibly shouted "Pepe!" at the request of another user. In September 2016, an article published on Hillary Clinton's campaign website described Pepe as "a symbol associated with white supremacy" and denounced Trump's campaign for its supposed promotion of the meme. In 2020, social scientist Joan Donovan said of the Clinton campaign's decision to describe Pepe as an alt-right symbol, "If it weren't for Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 trying to [...] name Pepe as a signifier of the Alt-Right, that kind of recognition probably wouldn't have taken hold [...] In doing so, they showed how much of a newbie they were at what it essentially meant to be online, which in turn created a wave of media attention on which the Alt-Right was ready to coast."
In an interview with "Esquire", Furie said of Pepe's usage as a hate symbol, "It sucks, but I can't control it more than anyone can control frogs on the Internet". Fantagraphics Books, Furie's publisher, issued a statement condemning the "illegal and repulsive appropriations of the character". The Anti-Defamation League, an American organization opposed to antisemitism, included Pepe in its hate symbol database but wrote that most instances of Pepe were not used in a hate-related context. Writing in "Time" on October 13, 2016, Furie said that "I understand that it's out of my control, but in the end, Pepe is whatever you say he is, and I, the creator, say that Pepe is "love"." The next day, the ADL announced that it had partnered with Furie to launch the #SavePepe (or "Save Pepe") campaign, an attempt to associate the symbol with positivity. As part of that campaign, Furie collected hundreds of "positive or peaceful" versions of Pepe to store in an online "Peace Pepe Database of Love". On October 17, 2016, Furie published a satirical take of Pepe's appropriation by the alt-right movement on The Nib. This was his first comic for the character since he ended "Boy's Club" in 2012.
In January 2017, in a response to "pundits" calling on Theresa May to disrupt Trump's relationship with Russia, the Russian Embassy in the United Kingdom tweeted an image of Pepe. White supremacist Richard B. Spencer, during a street interview after Trump's inauguration, was preparing to explain the meaning of a Pepe pin on his jacket when he was punched in the face, with the resulting video itself becoming the source of many memes.
On May 6, 2017, on Free Comic Book Day, it was announced that Furie had killed Pepe off in response to the character's continued use as a hate symbol. However, in an interview with Carol Off on her show "As It Happens" Furie said that despite news of Pepe's death, he will eventually return: "The end is a chance for a new beginning ... I got some plans for Pepe that I can't really discuss, but he's going to rise from the ashes like a phoenix ... in a puff of marijuana smoke." Soon thereafter, Furie announced his intention to "resurrect" Pepe, launching a crowdfunding campaign for a new comic book featuring Pepe. In a July 2017 interview with The Outline, Furie spoke about the comic in which he "killed" Pepe the Frog. He said, "This comic was just kind of my own kind of art therapy and dealing with the fact that Trump got elected and the new twist on Pepe that ensued. I decided to lay him to rest. But really it was just a joke, and a way for me to deal with the weirdness that was happening."
In June 2017, a proposed app and "Flappy Bird" clone called "Pepe Scream" was rejected from the Apple App Store due to its depiction of Pepe the Frog. The app's developer, under the name "MrSnrhms", posted a screenshot of his rejection letter on r/The Donald. The app is available on the Google Play Store.
A children's book appropriating the Pepe character, "The Adventures of Pepe and Pede", advanced "racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes", according to a federal lawsuit Furie filed. The suit was settled out of court in August 2017, with terms including the withdrawal of the book from publication and the profits being donated to the nonprofit Council on American-Islamic Relations. Initially self-published, the book was subsequently published by Post Hill Press. The book's author, a vice-principal with the Denton Independent School District, was reassigned after the publicity.
Until September 2018, Social media service Gab used a Pepe-like illustration of a frog (named "Gabby") as its logo. The site is popular with the alt-right.
In 2018, Furie succeeded in having images of Pepe removed from "The Daily Stormer" website.
In January 2019, the video game "Jesus Strikes Back: Judgment Day" was released, which allows players to play as Pepe the Frog, among other figures, and murder various target groups including feminists, minorities, and liberals.
In June 2019, Furie received a $15,000 out of court settlement in a copyright infringement case against Infowars and Alex Jones concerning unlicensed use of the image of Pepe the Frog on far-right themed posters. Furie stated that he would continue to "enforce his copyrights aggressively to make sure nobody else is profiting off associating Pepe the Frog with hateful imagery."
Kek.
"Kek", from "/", a Korean onomatopoeia of laughter used similarly to "LOL", is the Korean equivalent of the English "haha". Since this is often used in "StarCraft" matches, Blizzard, "Starcraft"'s developers, decided to reference it in "World of Warcraft" (2004): when a player of the Horde faction types "lol" using the "/say" messaging command, members of the opposing faction see it as "kek". A common misconception is that "kek" originated as a variation of "lel", itself a variation of "lol".
During the 2016 United States presidential election, Kek became associated with alt-right politics. Kek is associated with the occurrence of repeating digits, known as "dubs", "trips", "quads", among other terms, in the sequential codes assigned to posts made on 4chan, as if he had the ability to influence reality through Internet memes.
Online message boards such as 4chan first noted a similarity between Kek and Pepe. The phrase is widely used and 4chan users see Kek as the "'god' of memes". The phrase then became associated with the Egyptian deity of the same name.
"Esoteric Kekism" references the "Esoteric Hitlerism" of writer Savitri Devi. Esoteric Kekism, also called "the Cult of Kek", is a parody religion worshipping Pepe the Frog, which sprang from the similarity of the slang term for laughter, "kek", and the name of the ancient Egyptian frog god of darkness, Kek. This deity, in turn, was associated with Pepe the Frog on internet forums. The Internet meme has its origin on the internet message forum 4chan and other chans, and the board /pol/ in particular. Kek references are closely associated with Trump and the alt-right, and the Kek-Flag was spotted at the 2021 storming of the Capitol.
Kekistan.
Kekistan