att Furie – a superhumanly gentle person, imagine Bob Ross with a skateboard – never wanted to be in the political limelight. When we last spoke in 2016, just a few weeks before Donald Trump’s election, the artist was baffled by the “alt-right” adoption of his creation Pepe the Frog, a chill amphibian who had become a notorious avatar for hate. “He’s a frog, why would he support white supremacists?” he said at the time. “That doesn’t make any sense.” Over the last four years, Furie has patiently filed paperwork, attended depositions and met with lawyers to stop far-right figures such as InfoWars’ Alex Jones, Mike Cernovich, Richard Spencer and Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet, from using his work to promote bigotry and cruelty. He won high-profile cases against people selling posters, books and merchandise using his beloved little frog, including Jones, who paid him a $15,000 settlement out of court. This is likely nowhere near the sum Furie has lost on Pepe merchandise he feels he can no longer sell in good conscience, after the character was hijacked by extremists. In one scene in the recent documentary Feels Good Man, about Furie’s work to end his unwilling participation in rightwing meme culture, Furie is questioned by one of Jones’s lawyers. “So from 2001 to 2007, you had sort of this carefree, part-time, knucklehead life,” the lawyer, out of the frame, says. Furie, typically serene, answers: “I still have that.” On the phone from his home on the west coast, Furie maintains that carefreeness is less a state of being than a state of mind. To the extent that he engages with ugliness in the world, it is by making it more gentle through his comics and paintings, which draw equally on Dutch art and pop culture. “It’s kind of a mix between Bosch and Breughel and then, like, the Muppets and the Simpsons,” he says, of one series in his new book, Mindviscosity, a miscellany made up of trippy mandalas, more happy little frogs and awkward family portraits of fast-food mascots and horror movie monsters. There’s Mayor McCheese and his kids, pictured with their step-dad, Halloween’s Michael Myers; a werewolf couple with blood-drenched maws tenderly cradling twins; a dryad with a baby Terminator in a sling around her neck. “I wanted to show that the bad guys had families, too,” Furie says. “I was always interested in those family portraits people hang over their mantels, where the whole family dresses in white and is on the beach barefoot or something. There was always something kinda creepy about those.” Furie’s work is cartoony, but it also has a palpable, dimensional quality – some of that is because he etches the fur into his boards with an etching tool to create an embossment and then fills it in with coloured pencil. Though he’s modest about his work – he calls it “glorified study-hall doodling” – his new book has a sense of enormous scale to it. One spread features hundreds of his characters, row upon row, looking to the reader’s right as though posing for yearbook photos. It’s silly, but it’s also grand. And as Furie’s paintings get more complex, he gets further away from the cartoons that made his name. “Honestly, I haven’t really done comics in like a decade,” he says. “I’ve kind of moved on from it – it’s been haunting me. I liked doing it at the time, but I lost my mojo.” It’s hard to blame him. Furie is part of the fabric of internet culture now, for better or worse. He fields all kinds of engagement with his work and with himself, which can be dangerous: antisemitic conspiracy theorist Gionet once publicly posted Furie’s address. (The address was inaccurate; Furie had moved.) “You can’t be afraid,” Furie says. “You just gotta be yourself and be positive.” This may sound naive to some, but he is adamant: “A lot of times I’ve had an email saying ‘I hope you and your family die!’ and then I’ll just open up to them and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on? Have you had a bad day? You want to talk about it?’ Nine times out of 10, it’s a 15-year-old who’s angry at the world who really responds to me offering an olive branch. They’d start following me on Instagram and we’d be ‘friends’ after that.” “If you feed into it, it just makes things worse, but if you reach out – well, it’s hard to do that,” he admits. But just like in his work, Furie insists on the normality of those deemed weird by the world. The tension between the quotidian and the uncanny can be found throughout Mindviscosity: in his lizard children on bicycles, his goth monsters posing for sexy selfies, his bat-headed dads in their Alf tank tops. He prides himself on showing unexpected kindness. “I empathise with kids who are frustrated,” he says. “All you can do is try to lead by example. Everybody has the potential within them to be smart, good people. You can really change somebody with just a few simple, nice words. People get stuck in these psychological loops … and you can help them get off the wheel.”