Pepe the Frog is well known these days and appears in many different memes with a myriad of different captions. These days you’ll see a rare Pepe pop up on your facebook news feed or a sad Pepe but originally Pepe was created by Matt Furie who created a small comic series with Pepe as one of the main characters that went by the name Boy’s Club. The Boy’s club was essentially a comic that “satirized and celebrated the lifestyle of 20-something bros”.
source: http://www.vice.com/read/feels-good-man-728
Matt Furie began making the comics in 2005 and shared it to myspace which at the time was still a thing. In 2008 Pepe began picking up steam as a feel’s good man reaction image.
source: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-the-frog
Pepe was able to gain a lot of popularity through sites like 4chan and reddit where people shared memes among their respective communities and from the traffic those websites receive the funny memes tend to catch on very quickly, Pepe being one of them. An online video game named Gaia also embraced “feels good man” in their own community in 2009 for a Halloween comic. With an increased spread of the words “feels good man” there was bound to be an increased amount of searches made, and the Google Trends linked further below shows that there was a surge of searches in September and October 2009 which further backs this assumption.
The ‘feels good man’ Pepe debuted in this particular comic:
source: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/feels-good-man
A year later people turned Pepe into a feels bad man meme by changing his facial expression. At this point Pepe was becoming more and more popular which attracted more attention to the meme and what could be done with it. These days Pepe has been moulded into more than a handful of different memes with the current trendy one being a Donald Trump Pepe. The Pepe is distinguishable by being dressed in a suit & tie with a Trump-esque hairstyle.
Donald Trump himself even embraced himself in meme form with this tweet that links to a montage video featuring Trump early on in his political liftoff last year. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/653856168402681856?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
source: https://i.imgflip.com/1aa9x4.jpg
The popularity of Pepe memes also continues to grow that even celebrities have used them to illustrate feelings and emotions just like regular people. Yes its true, celebrities are memers at heart too!
https://twitter.com/katyperry/status/531011411720151041/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
source: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/4chans-frog-meme-went-mainstream-so-they-tried-to-kill-it
The political Pepe isn’t the only new one, people are creating more and more weird and funky Pepes every day in hopes of having the new funny, trendy meme.
Below we have a random meme that someone made in order to get a laugh out of people.
source : https://img.ifcdn.com/images/c24eb57dce4157837f74661f63a70709be84aacb13bcfa9fa578446bfcdf5cb4_1.jpg
https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%22feels%20good%20man%22,%22matt%20furie%22
This google trend shows that “feels good man” popped up some time around late 2007, early 2008 and by the end of the year spiked in popularity. Matt Furie on the other hand had only a fraction of the initial spike in 2008 and very recently caught up to “feels good man” just last month in September 2016. Matt is still active and still creates art to this day but the Pepe memes definitely contributed considerably to his increased popularity as of late.
Throughout my research of this topic I have discovered that people treat memes somewhat like a stock market, things are in and some things aren’t. Every meme has its own ‘shelf life’ if you will. Pepe memes are still going strong these days which would make them fairly high value in the ‘stock market’ of memes. This funny video I found on youtube can help you understand how the market works and just give you a good laugh.
These days making memes doesn’t even require the use of a photo editing software, you can simply search up a meme and insert text on a website that will generate the image for you. Unless you’re trying to create a very rare pepe to be sold in black market I think these will generally suffice.
I’ve created my own Pepe meme below that only those in our lecture will understand.
source: https://imgflip.com/i/1cuj7g credits: Me
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