Feels Good Man

As in many wild and wacky fairy tales, it all starts with a frog. This story, however, is all too real. In November 2016, a heated election cycle exposed a seismic cultural rift, and the country suddenly felt like a much different place for many people. For underground cartoonist Matt Furie, that sensation was even more surreal. Furie’s comic creation Pepe the Frog, conceived more than a decade earlier as a laid-back humanoid amphibian, had unwittingly become an unlikely political pawn. Pepe was first innocently co-opted as a meme in the MySpace era, only later to be perverted as a totem of the alt-right: tweeted by Donald Trump, condemned by Hillary Clinton, and declared a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. As America’s political and cultural narratives became more tribal, Pepe was suddenly whisked along for an unpredictably wild ride. His appeal among hate groups contained a dark magic: the more that powerful figures denounced this smiling, ironic frog as a racist dog-whistle, the more potent and legitimized he became. But Pepe’s tale is not just political, it is also the personal story of an artist battling to regain control of his creation, while confronting a disturbing cast of characters. As Pepe continues to morph around the world, Feels Good Man offers a vivid, moving portrait of one man, one frog, and the meme-mediated reality we’ve all found ourselves living in.