Matt Furie, a San Francisco-based cartoonist of reluctant notoriety, is a frog lover. He’s always drawn frogs: goofy frogs, peaceful frogs, frogs on bike rides, frogs having tea. “It’s just been kind of a slow drip of frogs throughout my entire life,” he says at the start of Feels Good Man, a new documentary about him and the character who leapt out into a life of his own. “Eventually, it was Pepe. He’s a happy little frog.”
Most people who have seen images of the now-infamous Pepe the Frog probably wouldn’t describe him that way. In the years after Furie created him for his lighthearted comic Boy’s Club, Pepe the Frog became a wildly popular internet meme. After catching on with weightlifters on Myspace, Pepe became the unofficial face of the anonymous imageboard site 4chan, and then exploded on other social media. Users redrew images of him as sad, smug, rageful, and sometimes violent: There has been school shooter Pepe, 9/11 Pepe, Nazi Pepe. In 2016, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) designated Pepe the Frog a hate symbol.
Directed by Arthur Jones and co-produced by Houstonian Giorgio Angelini, the Sundance award-winning Feels Good Man—which was scheduled to premiere at South by Southwest—takes us through the underbelly of the alt-right, drawing on complex research, data, and theory. But most of all it grounds us in Furie’s strange, unprecedented experience of accidentally creating a meme and watching his character morph into something unrecognizable.
