8.18.2009

Obama Joker Artist Interviewed


The scoundrel behind that portrait of Obama as the Joker has been found--and he's not the conservative you'd think he is. From the Los Angeles Times:

When cryptic posters portraying President Obama as the Joker from "Batman" began popping up around Los Angeles and other cities, the question many asked was, Who is behind the image? Was it an ultra-conservative grassroots group or a disgruntled street artist going against the grain? Nope, it turns out, just a 20-year-old college student from Chicago. Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe's Photoshop software. Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he'd found online about how to "Jokerize" portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it. Four or five hours later, he happily had his product.

Full, very interesting story here.

The pictures, of course, have been used by right-wingnuts to attack Obama as a socialist. The artist's critism of the President, however, is that there "wasn't much substance to him".
As for the Conservative red-baiting? "To accuse him of being a socialist is really ... immature," Alkhateeb tells the Los Angeles Times. "First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?"



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