"Pepe is dead. Long live Pepe" - So went the chants from the meme elite of 4Chan recently as news broke that cartoonist Matt Furie had recently decided to kill off his beloeved Pepe character from his "Boy’s Club” series.
The controversial character had been adopted by various online communities, from trolls and pranksters to the so called "alt right", and beyond. Of course, you can kill a comic character but you can't kill an idea. Hillary Clintons presidential campaign page sought to label Pepe a hate figure, but it only fueled the fire, giving Pepe "household name" status, and birthing copious new memes and variations.
If you do a little Googling, you can find doctored pictures of Barack Obama donning a swastika, Homer Simpson in a gay relationship, or Liam Neeson saying all manner of crazy shit. Does this represent the original people or characters? I don't think so. These are memes; bootlegs, if you will. Sometimes political, sometimes hateful, usually funny, to some and offensive to others. That's what free expression is about. In the world of memes, artist copyright and a characters integrity are unimportant. In fact, many memes seek to subvert the original image as much as possible.
So, is Pepe dead because Matt Furie says so? Of course not. Those who commandeered Pepe in the first place aren't about to bend to Furies wishes, nor should they. The notion that a green frog is a hate figure is absurd.
Friend, foe, communist, nazi, democrat, republican, magician, homosexual, big, small, happy, sad... Whether we like it or not, we will be seeing Pepe in many guises for a long time to come.