The internet’s most infamous frog gets a documentary redemption in Feels Good Man
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The ways in which the internet has changed (and possibly ruined) humanity are seismic and yet to be fully understood. But there’s one peculiarity of the online ecosystem that becomes painfully obvious the moment one dares to, say, make an irreverent joke about Spider-Man on a pop culture blog: When someone acts like an asshole online, you’re supposed to just sit there and take it. If someone came up to you at a supermarket and said, “You’re a disgusting pig and I hope you kill yourself,” you’d be justified in at least replying, “Hey, fuck you, buddy!” But online, the conventional wisdom is to pretend like none of it is happening, lest you make the attacks worse by defending yourself. Because if you defend yourself, you’re admitting that these hurtful words got to you. And on the internet, where lulz are king and caring is for cucks, any sign of sincerity or emotion—let alone vulnerability—can be fatal.
No one knows the corroding effects of this malignancy better than Matt Furie, the Bay Area cartoonist who created Pepe The Frog. Originally conceived as the permanently stoned “little brother” character of a sitcom-esque crew of cartoon party dudes in Furie’s late-’00s comic Boys Club, Pepe went from a single six-panel comic uploaded to Myspace to being officially declared a hate symbol in less than a decade. This journey is chronicled in the new documentary Feels Good Man, which begins with Furie creating Pepe and ends with him trying to reclaim the character from white supremacists and “alt-right” shitposters.
How this happened is the stuff of book-length analyses, and Feels Good Man sprints through the history of memes and the evolution of online nihilism from its relatively innocent origins—alienated adolescent males commiserating with each other on message boards like 4chan—to its co-option by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. But this is a case study, not a survey. And the character of Pepe is intrinsic enough to this progression that simply documenting Pepe’s devolution over the years serves as a shorthand for the larger story. As Furie succinctly puts it, “It’s just, like, fucking garbage world.”
Along the way, director Arthur Jones manages to dig up interview subjects whose soundbites would be funny if they weren’t so real: Take the proud owner of a “rare” Pepe meme purchased for nearly $40,000 at auction, or the 4channer who explains that Pepe culture took a dark turn when “sex haver[s] and wom[en]” discovered the frog. Ridiculous, right? But that’s the point—as Feels Good Man illuminates, the adoption of absurd jokes like Pepe as mascots for racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny girds that hate in the armor of irony, a process that eventually breaks down the concept of reality itself. Think Alex Jones—a loud, enraging presence in Jones’ doc—calling himself a “performance artist” or Trump’s own insistence that his statements are jokes whenever he receives backlash.
Feels Good Man would be a valuable addition to our current cultural moment if it were simply an intelligently assembled explainer on irony poisoning. But Jones and producer Giorgio Angelini—who shares an “a film by” credit with the director—have also created a character study of Furie, who comes across as a sweet man who likes drawing, cats, and hanging out with his daughter and whose only crime was not being able to predict the future. That characterization also applies to his inner circle of artist friends; in one particularly pitiable scene, Furie’s roommate shows the filmmakers the Pepe tattoo he got during the heady first days of the character’s popularity. These poor bastards learned from experience that once a character goes out into the world, you can’t control it anymore—not even if the creator kills it off, as Furie did with Pepe in 2017.
Furie isn’t completely without agency, however, as shown in the film’s oddly hopeful final stretch. Just making this documentary is a step toward the redemption of Pepe, ending on a note of animated optimism as Pepe ascends into a nirvana of good vibes and peaceful intentions. (As one might hope from a documentary about a cartoonist, the animated sequences in Feels Good Man are far above average.) Simply reclaiming this one character won’t fix everything—as is stated more than once in the documentary, the genie cannot be put back into the bottle. Things are likely to get (even) worse before they get better, but if you want to fight something, first you have to understand it. Feels Good Man does just that, and it’s pretty darn entertaining, too.
30 Comments
I’m happy to see this being rated so well! I’ve been interested in it since I saw the first previews.It’s been a while since I’ve seen Pepe and had the immediate alt-right connotation. These days it seems like Twitch has more of a foothold over the character… he almost seems like the unofficial mascot of the site.I know Twitch isn’t very highly-regarded around these parts but it’s undoubtedly better than something like 4chan
what’s wrong w/ twitch?
It takes the worst parts of video games, social media, and cam whoring and shoves them into one shitty package.
I see him everywhere in games that allows custom emblems. Whether that’s just edgy teens being edgy or something worse is a matter of debate. Personally I just assume anyone with that as an icon is an asshole.
Some guys added Pepe to the slack icon gallery at work and they use it often and God how much I hate it.
I’m of course not 100% sure on this, but I’m betting Matt Furie loves the attention from all this. He created a shit comic, and anyone that is honest with themselves will agree that Boy’s Club is a garbage comic book. And now it’s a worldwide meme. He’s probably made bank on it.People took the obscure Pepe and made it a symbol. He had no control over that. But Pepe is shit, and his origins is shit. There’s nothing special about him at all.Now, Joan Cornellà, that’s a man who deserves many memes and much credit for creating a memorable and unique comic. No one can argue that this is comedy gold:
i would actually be willing to wager part of what he is so mad about is that a bunch of other people probably made bank merchandising his character
Eh, maybe a little bit. But he’s still the main guy when it comes to Pepe I bet.Fun fact: I wrote to an author I really liked asking if he needed stories for any of his books. I told him he could put his name on them and make them his own if he wanted. He wrote me back thanking me for the offer, but said it wasn’t necessary, and then said he would read them if I wanted to send them to him. Long story short: he ended up publishing a couple of my short stories under his name in an anthology book. I gave up my rights of ownership of these stories, but just seeing them published was fuckin awesome. I didn’t need/want or do it for the money. Someone else will get the credit for it and all the royalties, but I don’t care. I know who wrote it and that’s enough for me.
That is still not what decent people do. It’s not rare that authors acknowledge others for the given ideas. Authors who don’t have no excuse, whatever the demand or indifference of the person who gave an idea.
I disagree with that. Losing control over a creation can be quite violent. Of course, most examples it evokes me are examples I’ve heard of, therefore examples of stuff that already had some solid success and visibility. Still, I think of Hergé’s control of Tintin (example of refusal of other authors touching his character) or Uderzo and Goscinny’s fight against the extreme-right which was hijacking Asterix.The documentary itself is probably a nice spotlight on his work, because everything has multiple aspects. But I don’t think that you should downplay what it means to have your own character becoming a champion of neonazism. I really don’t think that “hey at least he’s famous” compensates it.“Hey, they stole my lovingly customized van ! Ah but at least they used it to plow into the BLM crowds with it. So, hey, it’s famous now, cool.”Whether his comics are good or not is very irrelevant. What matters is what people associate you and your creation with, what they make you an accomplice of. If it wasn’t for his history of protests and that documentary, that author would have been de facto, in the eyes of everyone, drafted in the nazi army. His character is, and that must be genuinely distressing.
that’s actually objectively bad because now there’s an obstacle between your talent and the audience that wants to read it
Yeah, you’re just a cunt who makes sure other artists don’t get paid.
This is probably true.
Hey! I read this comment yesterday and it lodged in my brain, and I have to know more. When I was in my first year of university, a friend claimed to have done the same thing – he showed us a collection of someone else’s writing and said “see that story? I wrote it! I sent it to the writer and he published it under his own name!” and we were all very impressed. Then, a year after that, he stole a bunch of money from his friends and family, and told some ridiculous lies to cover it up, and we discovered that he was a pathological liar. After that happened, we went back over everything he had told us and felt embarrassed that we ever thought that “I secretly wrote this famous author’s story” was anything other than an obvious lie. Since then, I have become an author too, and I can tell you straight up that I would never submit anyone else’s work under my own name – even if there was a solid intellectual property agreement in place. I have guest-written chapters and stories for other people’s books and they have, without fail, credited me for my work.I’m not on the attack here, by the way – but if I’m wrong, I really need to know. Can you tell me anything else about what happened? If a writer takes your work without paying you, the least you should get is the credit. You can’t have signed an NDA without payment, so what’s the deal? Can you reveal the name of the writer, and the story? Or any other details about what happened?If famous authors really are publishing unknown writers’ work under their own names, then I owe my friend an apology for doubting him.(He still stole a lot of money, though.)
I suspect his legal fees have outweighed his personal take. He’s had to sue a few far right organizations for using the image – Info Wars was the most notable. He got about $15k from it, but I’m sure his legal fees were as much or more than that.He has been a bit middle road on the concern about who is using it, but he does seem pretty pissed that people might be making money off of it.
Yeah, it’s always fun when the Nazis turn your work into a new hate symbol.
I was gonna write how it is pretty awesome to create a politcal cartoon, but I just can’t. Life has surpassed being sarcastic.
Pepe went from a single six-panel comic uploaded to Myspace to being officially declared a hate symbol in less than a decade. A hilarious sign of the times.
Nope can’t argue there. Solid gold.
Then you’re a fucking idiot.
Hey, fuck you buddy!
I am honest with myself and I like Boy’s Club
I really hope you watch Feels Good Man, because, “I’m betting Matt Furie loves the attention from all this” is not correct at all
I will probably watch it.
If one of my creations was co-opted by the far right in such a way it would destroy me. His fame is based on him being a sucker or a victim, depending on your politics, and far as I know he’s made very little money on this, at least relative to pepe’s popularity. Do you really think these 4chan types are paying royalties?
What a weird fucking thing to say
Things are likely to get (even) worse before they get betterI wish I could work up that optimism; I’m convinced things are going to get even worse before they get worse still on their way to being worse than we can imagine.
Matt Furie is great and didn’t deserve all of this shit, regardless if you like his work or not.
pepe isnt interesting or special enough to need redeeming. I feel the same way about the twitch community who refuse to let it go and accept its alt right connections. There are thousands of memes. I dont get why this one needs to have so much backing outside of just being stubborn.
Never allow nazis to have anything.