Matt Furie is the creator of the Boy's Club comic series. He was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1979 and is of sicilian descent.
He's also the author of the children's book The Night Riders and the creator of the Pepe the Frog meme, originally a character from Boy's Club, which is the subject of the 2020 documentary feature, Feels Good Man.
Matt Furie's deadpan comics showcase slacker roommates Andy, Brett, Landwolf, and Pepe along with outsider characters like Steve, Fofar and Bird-Dog in a series of comical vignettes combining laconic psychedelia, childlike enchantment, drug-fueled hedonism, and impish mischief. While in The Night Riders, focused on a more child friendly story about Mystery the Frog and his best friends Wat the Rat ,Toki the Dragon and Hoodrat the Bat on an adventure.The perpetually insouciant glaze of his characters belie the sharp verbal and visual wit of Furie, who delivers a stoner classic for the Tumblr generation. In fact, Furie's wildly popular teenage weirdoes became an overnight internet sensation when Pepe the Frog was widely adopted by users of 4chan and remixed ad infinitum from there (including uses by pop stars like Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry), giving Boy's Club built-in recognition with many. A spiritual cousin to Simon Hanselmann's Megahex and Joán Cornella's Mox Nox, Boy's Club's sense of humor will especially resonate with fans of stoner comedies and black humor.
Furie currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, artist Aiyana Udesen, and their daughter Ursula. He enjoys long walks with his rat, bubble baths, and hours of Aphex Twin.[1]
History[]
“ | I try to stay in touch with my inner child and try not to lose that childlike wonder. It's important to me to stay in awe of all the beauty and weirdness in both the natural and the human world. It's been harder to hold on to that viewpoint as I've gotten older but that's been my goal.
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– Matt Furie[2] |
As a child, Furie enjoyed watching cartoons, reading books, playing video games and doodling monsters and animals. He says that his aesthetic is a slow evolution that began as a child, which has always been rooted in escapism. Furie grew up with a little brother and two cousins, each one assigned a Ninja Turtle, which were shape-shifters, animals, warriors, soldiers. He enjoyed drawing the characters I imagined being. He spent long days at his grandmother’s house drawing fruit vs. vegetable wars with his brother.[3]
Furie followed summer college classes and took fundamental classes in painting, figure drawing and sculpture at the Columbus School of Art and Design and studied art at Ohio Wesleyan University, where he graduated in 2001.[3] He was into Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, and Pablo Picasso, as well as contemporary surrealists like H.R. Giger and David Lynch. After college, he moved to San Francisco, where he lived for a decade.[3]
Trivia[]
- Furie says that he dreams about emotional affairs with black women on spaceships or riding around in the pouch of a marsupial and that he hopes that that comes out in his art.[4]