Adam Serwer: Who is Pepe the Frog and how did you come up with him?

Matt Furie: Pepe started in the early 2000s, I had just been drawing a lot of frog faces, and I came up with a frog character to be one of four characters in a comic book that I did called Boy’s Club, and it started off as a zine, I would just publish it just for my friends and associates and stuff. You know just at Kinkos, make copies of it.

Eventually I did some independent publishing with it, and I did about four comics called Boy’s Club, and Pepe is kind of like, in the comic version of him, in my version of him, he’s just kind of an everyman frog, he lives with his three roommates, a dog, a bear and a wolf. It just kind of expresses early 20-something hedonistic lifestyle, of just hanging out, playing pranks on each other, eating pizza, partying, that kind of thing. A lot of bodily humor.

For whatever reason, the Pepe the Frog guy was singled out and started to evolve into this whole internet thing.

Serwer: How did it feel when Pepe turned into an internet meme?

Furie: When it started out, it was just a thing that people would use on message boards. There was a six-panel comic page of Pepe taking a leak with his pants all the way down, and one of his roommates walks in on him. Later on they’re playing video games, and his buddy Landwolf says “I heard you pull your pants all the way down to go pee,” and Pepe responds by saying “feels good man,” he looks happy. So that was kind of cut out from there, and used in a viral way, people would say things like “I just finished my final exam” and they’d post the happy frog saying “feels good man.” So it was like kind of a positive reinforcement thing.

And then different bits and pieces were lifted from the comic until finally the sad frog one, which is the one he’s most known for, was in a panel where he didn’t really describe why he was sad, but he says, “I always have time for eating pizza on a bagel,” and then he sadly lifts up a pizza bagel into his mouth and takes a bite of it. So the comic itself is just mellow, he’s just a chill frog and is pretty good natured.

It has a lot of pop culture references in it, they say “got milk” and “that would be a yes,” and just kind of all this funny stuff that is worked into my brain from growing up in the late 80s early 90s.

Serwer: Have you been able to make any money off the popularity of Pepe? Has it been financially beneficial for you?

Furie: Here and there, I just did an official, it’s called Pepe Official clothing line, one of the items of clothing is a button up white shirt, with a pattern of Pepes on it, and all of those Pepes were kind of reflections of those crudely drawn, it almost looks like kids did them on microsoft paint or something. It was kind of like a bootleg of a bootleg. So I’m doing little enterprising things like that.