College Student Behind Obama "Joker" Poster

“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.

Obama-joker-time On Jan. 18, Alkhateeb uploaded the image to photo-sharing site Flickr (shown at right). Over the next two months, he amassed just a couple thousand hits, he said.” Cont…

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

The guy holds conflicting views, though. He thinks Kucinich had more substance, yet he prefers "Republican ideals" on domestic issues.

Which I thought would be flamebait for sure considering his contradictory views

Maybe he was referring to that.

:wtf:

Kid is a fackin idiot.

The RW is ANGRY. Those folks do not sound even remotely rational.

better smack your game up, firas, because you suck!

He scanned and modified the Time magazine cover as a learning excersize with Photoshop. He then loaded it, as a TIME cover, to Flckr. He did not make it into the current poster, print anything, or paste anything. I would not hold him to account in any way for its use.