Obama Joker artist unmasked: A fellow Chicagoan

Source: L A Times

August 17, 2009 | 6:29 pm


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.


Read more: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/08/obama-joker-artist.html

The teabaggers' hero is an Ay-rab!

Alkhateeb originally altered a Time Magazine cover from last October. Someone else in L.A. altered that further, by taking out the magazine title and red border box, and then adding the "Socialism" text.

There's a long tradition of creating strong political images and posters from fair-use, copyrighted originals. It's a sign of political health that as a society we protect those images, whether or not they happen to piss a lot of people off.

Actually, if you think about it, the only ones that need protecting ARE the ones that piss people off. ;)

someone with an open mind amazing......I like Obama but you are 100% correct we have to protect everyone's point of view, some on this site are all for freedom of speech as long as it does not piss THEM off. +1

Interesting that the guy is a Kucinich fan. And I couldn't agree with him more with this:

"Regardless, Alkhateeb does agree with the Obama "Hope" artist about "socialism" being the wrong caption for the Joker image. "It really doesn't make any sense to me at all," he said. "To accuse him of being a socialist is really ... immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?""

Never have. Can someone explain it to me?


Cher

Otherwise, those horrible scars would have been fixed long ago.

I guess it must be something that requires a fascist worldview to get.

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