Who Owns Bishop Pepe?

Matt Furie is an American artist based in Los Angeles. He is generally identified as the creator of the popular internet meme known as Pepe the Frog (a claim disputed by Andrew Anglin). His Pepe character was unveiled on Myspace in 2005. In 2006, Pepe appeared in print in a comic called Boy’s Club. There, Pepe was a black-and-white line drawing, described by Furie himself as “almost coloring book style, very minimal.” That crude comic book, now marketed on Amazon.com as a “stoner classic,” portrays Pepe and his three slacker roomies as “teenage weirdos” given over to “laconic psychedelia, childlike enchantment, drug-fueled hedonism, and impish mischief.” Furie’s Pepe likes to urinate with his pants pulled down around his ankles. When asked why, Pepe famously answers, “feels good man.”
By 2008, the Pepe meme had been “widely adopted by users of 4chan and remixed ad infinitum from there.” His character and image, if not his name, were transformed. Anonymous online fans coloured his face green with brown lips and the laidback hedonism of the comic book Pepe was adapted “to fit different scenarios and emotions, such as melancholy, anger, and surprise”. In short, Furie lost control over the Pepe meme.
For quite a while Furie remained faithful to Pepe’s hippy lifestyle. Accordingly, up until September 2016, he repeatedly professed indifference to bourgeois legal issues such as copyright and intellectual property. For example, when asked in an interview with The Atlantic whether he was upset by the ubiquitous use of the Pepe meme or the fact that people were “using him in different contexts,” Furie replied, “It’s never bothered me, in fact, “it’s been kind of inspiring to me.” But, the interviewer interjects, what “about the way it’s been adopted by the so-called alt-right”? Furie remains unruffled: “My feelings are pretty neutral, this isn’t the first time that Pepe has been used in a negative, weird context. … It’s just out of my control, what people are doing with it, and my thoughts on it, are more of amusement”. Read more


Bitter Harvest (2017) is a film inspired by the love and rediscovery of the writer Richard Bachynsky Hoover’s ethnic heritage. On a trip to the homeland of his Slavic ancestors he began to ruminate on how to capture the story of the Holodomor on film. With small acting parts in a variety of television series Bachynsky Hoover was learning the ropes of the film and entertainment industry. He went again to Kiev, investigating his family history. It was 2004 and the Orange Revolution was in full swing — he saw firsthand a Ukraine in the midst of upheaval. He learned that Western audiences had never seen the Holodomor dramatized on film — a dramatically different situation compared to that other genocide that has become a touchstone of Western Civilization and both a sword and a shield for Jewish and Israeli interests through endless promotion in the media. In 2008 he would return with a script, seeking financing for an English language period piece set during the Holodomor. He met with officials from the Ukrainian Government as well as various oligarchs. All of them turned him down. It was not until 2011 that the dream to make his movie finally caught a glimmer of hope when fellow Ukrainian Canadian investor Ian Ihnatowycz committed $21 million to the film.



