Billy Butcher is an artist with a taste for mashing the real with the fantastic, but he does so in a satirical fashion geared to make us question the context of ‘the real’ to begin with. By which I mean when we look at his below gallery featuring real life villains depicted as comic book super-villains, were forced to join Billy in asking;
if the comic book supervillains were actually the ones threatening real life, the world wouldn’t be such a bad place.
That’s a fairly grim prognosis, but with such a league of fairly insidious individuals lined up below (Hitler, Mao, Stalin and Bin Laden….and also FaceBook founder Marc Zuckerberg?) it’s easy to see that we’ve seen some worse atrocities perpetrated in real life than we ever will on the printed page.
The artist describes this series as:
an experiment where a dictator, a psycho, a murderer (sometimes they are the whole package) or even a suspicious figure from real life is mashed with a comics bad guy - strangely related some way or the other with his counterpart.
The ‘pop art’ styling is beautiful, though the studies themselves and the grim subjects contained within pack an intellectual punch that makes you think outside of the bright colors. Hitler as Galactus for example makes an dark kind of sense, the same way GW Bush as Two-Face is an interesting, and some would say spot on analogy. But that’s as deeply as I’m going to comment. I’ll leave the rest to your own interpretation.
Check em out below
