Matt Furie created Pepe the Frog as one of four characters in *Boy's Club*, an indie comic series about post-college slacker roommates who spend their time playing video games, eating pizza, and being harmlessly gross1. Furie began posting the comics to his MySpace blog in a series of updates around late 20052. The comic was later published in print by Buenaventura Press starting in 20066.

The specific bathroom scene had a real-life origin story. Furie's partner Aiyana posed for the drawing: "He said, 'Can you stand over there and kind of make it look like you're pulling your pants down while you're bending over so I can draw you?' So yea, that was my butt… and my toilet"2. Furie himself drew the scenario from childhood memory: "When I was younger, me and my cousin David would go to the same school and whenever he would go to the public bathroom he would pull his pants all the way down to pee. Underwear and everything. It seemed like it would feel really good"2.

In early 2008, someone on 4chan's /b/ board uploaded a scan of the comic page6. On February 4th, 2008, Something Awful contributor Jon Hendren (known online as @fart) posted the "Feels Good Man" comic to the site, helping push it into wider circulation6.

The phrase "Feels Good Man" launched Pepe the Frog's entire meme career and became the title of a critically acclaimed documentary. Arthur Jones' 2020 film *Feels Good Man* premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker7. It later won an Emmy Award in 2021 for Outstanding Research: Documentary7. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 95% approval rating based on 81 reviews7. Polygon called it "the most important political film of 2020"7.

The documentary aired on PBS as part of its Independent Lens series and on BBC Four's Storyville in October 20207. It was later added to the FAST service Pluto TV in Canada11.

The ADL's designation of Pepe as a hate symbol in 2016 made "Feels Good Man" part of a larger conversation about how images can be weaponized online10. ADL director Oren Segal clarified that context matters: using Pepe to describe eating your friend's French fries is not hateful, while Photoshopping Pepe in front of a concentration camp is10. He also noted that "the hate symbol database isn't the final stop for this meme," suggesting Pepe could move past the association10.

Hong Kong protesters' adoption of Pepe during the 2019 pro-democracy movement showed the image could be reclaimed for entirely different purposes1. Furie's legal battles, including his case against Infowars, set precedents for independent creators fighting to maintain control of their work in the internet age5.

The trajectory of "Feels Good Man" is inseparable from the larger story of Pepe the Frog, but the catchphrase itself marks the starting point of everything that followed. Before Pepe was a political symbol or a protest icon, he was just a chill frog who liked pulling his pants down.

Furie's *Boy's Club* comics starred four anthropomorphic monsters: Pepe, Brett, Andy, and Landwolf. They spent their time in situations involving bodily fluids and 90s catchphrases like "Got Milk?" and "As if!"6. The comics were intentionally low-key and weird, born from the same San Francisco indie comics scene that Arthur Jones came up in4. Furie grew up fascinated by frogs, building them out of LEGO pieces and sketching them obsessively5. That tenderness carried into Pepe's design: big expressive eyes, thin red lips, and a goofy grin that could read as innocent or sly depending on context1.

When the "Feels Good Man" panel escaped MySpace and landed on 4chan, it filled a gap in online communication. People didn't have the emoji vocabulary they do today, and Pepe's expressive face became a flexible stand-in for a range of emotions8. Someone even made a "Feels Good Man" song during this early period2. The meme's spread through bodybuilding forums and other niche communities showed how a single comic panel could detach from its source material and take on entirely new meanings.

The trouble started when Pepe went mainstream. Celebrities like Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj shared Pepe images on social media10. Perry even admitted to having a "Pepe file" on her computer10. This mainstream adoption triggered a backlash from 4chan users who viewed Pepe as their own. As writer Dale Beran explained in the documentary: "Whenever they thought outsiders were stealing their memes, they would try and make them as offensive as possible"5. The goal was to create versions of Pepe so grotesque that "normies" would stop using him8.

This effort collided with the 2016 presidential campaign. 4chan users who supported Donald Trump began creating Pepe memes aligned with his platform5. Joel Finkelstein, director of the Contagion Network Research Institute, explained the appeal: Pepe "combines this impossible mixture of innocence and evil"5. Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. posted an Instagram image depicting himself and other supporters as "The Deplorables," with Pepe in the lineup10. In September 2016, the Anti-Defamation League added Pepe to its hate symbol database10. Hillary Clinton's campaign even published an explainer about why the frog was problematic1.

Furie was devastated. "To have it evolve into what it is today, it's a nightmare," he told the Los Angeles Times. "It's kind of my worst nightmare… to be tangled in forever with a symbol of hate"10. He tried several approaches to reclaim Pepe: flooding the internet with positive Pepe images through the #SavePepe campaign, working with the ADL, and even killing off the character in a 2017 comic strip funeral1. Jones described these as "his earnest attempts to try to express the true intentions of Pepe as a character," though they were "fundamental misunderstandings of how the Internet works"1.

What did work was legal action. With help from a pro-bono law firm, Furie began issuing takedown notices and filing copyright suits1. He took Infowars to court over a print featuring Pepe alongside Roger Stone, Donald Trump, and Kellyanne Conway5. Producer Giorgio Angelini pointed out the core problem: "[Furie] doesn't have this multi-million dollar conglomerate behind him pushing the character and the branding of Pepe. So in that void, the collective consciousness of the Internet creates that brand"1.

A turning point came in 2019 when pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong adopted Pepe as a symbol of resistance1. The filmmakers were surprised by this development, which provided a hopeful ending for their documentary3. Jones screened the film at Pomona College in 2023, where he connected the meme's journey to what he called "narrative collapse": "The internet has largely exploded this dynamic of coherency. Instead, we are sort of all piecing together our reality from these fragments, these little memes"9.

On Twitch and other platforms, Pepe variants circulate today in largely apolitical contexts, stripped of the baggage from 20161. The Rare Pepe NFT project, which ran from 2016 to 2018 on a Bitcoin blockchain branch called Counterparty, expanded to over 1,700 artworks centered on the character. Furie himself contributed a Pepe illustration to the series in October 20218.