The cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog has taken legal action to force the author of a self-published children’s book that uses the character to espouse “racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes” to give all of his profits to a Muslim advocacy organisation.
Pepe, created by Matt Furie in the early 2000s as a “peaceful frog-dude” with the catchphrase “feels good man”, was adopted as a symbol by supporters of the US “alt-right” last year. He has since been designated by the Anti-Defamation League as a hate symbol, but Furie has been attempting to end the association, even killing off the character in one comic strip and subsequently launching a Kickstarter to raise money to “save Pepe”.
“Pepe became a meme around 2010, then stuck around the internet long enough to become an institutionally recognised hate mascot. Needless to say it’s a nightmare so I killed him off. But now I’d like to bring him back, and I’d like to ask your help in funding a new zine celebrating a resurrected Pepe, one that shall shine a light in all this darkness and feel good again,” wrote Furie on the Kickstarter platform, which raised more than $34,000 (£26,000), substantially more than his $10,000 goal.
Furie’s lawyers have also successfully stopped the distribution of Eric Hauser’s children’s book The Adventures of Pepe and Pede. According to the Washington Post, the book sees Pepe and “his best friend Centipede” – centipede is a term for Trump supporters – as they attempt to “bring freedom back to Wishington Farm”, battling an alligator named “Alkah” with buds from “the honesty tree”. Hauser was an assistant principal at a Texas middle school until details of the book became public.
Hauser, who subsequently resigned, told the Dallas Morning News that he had been unaware of Pepe the Frog’s association with the white supremacist movement until he published the book, believing him instead to be a conservative meme. He told the Dallas Observer that the book was was not intended to be racist.
But WilmerHale, the law firm representing Furie, said the book “espoused racist, Islamophobic and hate-filled themes, included allusions to the alt-right movement and was deliberately targeted at children”. The firm said that when Hauser was threatened with litigation he admitted infringement, and agreed to stop distribution of the book in all forms. It is no longer for sale on Amazon.
“Under US copyright law, Furie is entitled to all of the profits that Hauser made by selling his infringing book. Instead, per the agreement – and at Furie’s insistence – Hauser will be required to give all of his profits to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization,” said WilmerHale.
According to Motherboard, that amounts to $1,521.54. “Furie does not want money made by peddling hateful themes to children,” WilmerHale told the website. “Furie wants one thing to be clear: Pepe the Frog does not belong to the alt-right. As this action shows, Furie will aggressively enforce his intellectual property, using legal action if necessary, to end the misappropriation of Pepe the Frog … He will make sure that no one profits by using Pepe in alt-right propaganda – and particularly not by targeting children.”