Pepe the Frog

A green anthropomorphic frog in a blue t-shirt, drawn by Matt Furie for his 2005 zine comic Boy's Club. In one panel he urinates with his trousers fully down and, asked about it, says: feels good man. That panel was posted to Myspace and then 4chan, and the character was gradually redrawn into a whole emotional vocabulary — smug, angry, sad, crying — with the counterpart phrase feels bad man.

It first appeared in 2008, during early YouTube.

Pepe is the most consequential meme character there has been, because he demonstrates something the internet had not previously had to face: that a drawing can be taken from its author entirely, by people acting collectively and anonymously, and that authorship provides no protection. From 2015 he was systematically adopted as an emblem by the American far right, and in 2016 the Anti-Defamation League added him to its hate-symbol database while noting most uses were not hateful.

Furie killed the character in a comic strip, then sued organisations using him and won or settled repeatedly, and a 2020 documentary followed the attempt to take him back. Pepe has since been reclaimed for other purposes — he was widely used by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, who were largely unaware of the American history — which is either the end of the story or a demonstration that a symbol cannot be owned at all.