Pepe the Frog (/ˈpɛpeɪ/ PEP-ay) 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 progenitor of Boy's Club was a zine Furie made on Microsoft Paint called Playtime, which included Pepe as a character.

[6] 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.

[20] Color was also added; originally a black-and-white line drawing, Pepe became green with brown lips, sometimes in a blue shirt.

[15][16] "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.

[28] As early as 2015, a number of Pepe variants were created by Internet trolls to associate the character with the alt-right movement.

[10][29] 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.

[39] Fantagraphics Books, Furie's publisher, issued a statement condemning the "illegal and repulsive appropriations of the character".

"[42][43] 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.

[1] 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.

[51][52] 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.

[53][54] 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.

[55][56] 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.

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.

[12] 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.

[67] 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.

[72][73][74][75][76][2] 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.

[99][106] Kekistanis have also adopted Internet personality Gordon Hurd (in his "Big Man Tyrone" persona) as their president and the 1986 Italo disco record "Shadilay" as a national anthem.

[113][115] Hong Kongers were also generally unaware that Pepe the Frog had been appropriated by the alt-right and white supremacists in the United States.

The related Rare Pepe crypto project, created by various artists worldwide between 2016 and 2018, was based on the aforementioned meme and traded as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) recorded on the CounterParty platform.

[120][121] By 2017, a community had grown around the digital collectables,[122] spurring developers to build platforms for the purpose of cataloging and exchanging these images, thereby creating the first crypto art market in 2016.

[126][127] Two components, created simultaneously, both support each other to enable interaction and asset exchange among both contributors and market participants: Crypto artists used these resources to publish their work as digital tokens with a fixed circulation[122] and then issued the art to collectors who then sold, traded, or stored their collections.

[129] A 2020 documentary, Feels Good Man, relates the story of Pepe's origins and co-option by the alt-right, and Furie's attempts to regain control over his creation.