Deftly juggling whimsical absurdism and a sense of real-world nightmare, Feels Good Man sees this “happy little frog” turned into an alter ego-sometimes sad, sometimes raging-for “owning your loserdom” among the kinds of self-appointed “social rejects” who stereotypically live in Mom’s basement, airing resentment toward “normies” (who have actual jobs and girlfriends) on toxic web forums like 4chan.
That this should somehow have bred the memes that would be embraced and utilized by everyone from anonymous incel types (involuntarily celibate young men who congregate online) to Donald Trump himself still strikes Furie-now a father and an acclaimed children’s book author-and his colleagues as “incredibly random.” But that, alas, is how the internet so often works, turning something trivial into hypercombustible fuel for compulsive trolls. The slacker humor was at once rude and harmless, never more so than in a panel where Pepe shrugs and says “Feels good man” to explain his habit of urinating with pants down at ankle level. He conceived the comic strip while working at a store in San Francisco’s Mission district called Community Thrift, initially posting installments on Myspace. Its four anthropomorphic roomies parodied his own “post-college zone” of playing video games, drinking, and hanging out.
Scheduled to begin streaming September 4, the film shows the ways in which public political discourse has steadily been warped, just in time for what might be the most venomously contested presidential election in American history.Ī guileless goofball not unlike his most famous drawn character, Furie introduced humanoid amphibian Pepe in 2005 as part of his Boy’s Club comic. Giorgio Angelini and Arthur Jones’s documentary Feels Good Man, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, charts the bizarre events and circumstances that led to Pepe the Frog getting pulled to the “dark side”-much to the horror of his originator. But imagine your creative baby growing up to be embraced and manipulated by neo-Nazis, Infowars’ Alex Jones, and other reactionary extremists-and getting added to the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Symbols Database as a result. Of course, it’s always painful to see an offspring go astray. This was not what formerly San Francisco–based artist Matt Furie (who now lives in Los Angeles) had in mind when he created Pepe the Frog about 15 years ago. Yet that’s just what happened-taking us from Haight Street to hate speech, as it were.
Natural seemed unlikely to provide the modern alt-right with a meme-driven cartoon mascot. Still, San Francisco retains a liberal vibe, and the town that once gave us Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead and the cannabis-saturated likes of R.
Much has changed in the half century since the Haight-Ashbury was the counterculture’s epicenter. The Bay Area played host to underground comics’ first wave in the late 1960s and early ’70s, with most of the scene’s major artists and leading publishers located there.
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