Pepe croaks: artist kills frog

The cartoonist who created Pepe the Frog has killed off the character in a rebuke to far-right extremists who transformed a benevolent Internet meme into a racist, anti-Semitic symbol. A Pepe cartoon released Saturday in comic book stores shows Matt Furie’s creation in an open casket. Furie didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Monday. In a Time magazine essay last year, Furie described Pepe as “chill frog-dude.” But Internet trolls hijacked the character and began flooding social media with hateful Pepe memes more than a year before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Pepe became a symbol of the “alt-right” fringe movement and its loosely connected brand of white nationalism, neo-Nazism and antiimmigration.