OBEY ALFRED E. NEUMAN

Artist Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic OBEY/OBAMA image we've seen so much during the current presidential campaign, writes:

Check out this link to a plethora of parodies of my Obama HOPE poster. I’m very happy that the HOPE poster has become such a point of reference. One parody that is not included is something I consider a high point in my career for pop culture recognition. Mad Magazine’s new cover is a spoof of my Obama image. I loved Mad as a kid. I think Mad’s satire heightened my understanding of irony and hypocrisy. I’m very excited to be a part of Mad’s history.

mad history (obeygiant.com, thanks Sean "kappa hunter" Bonner!)

• [two20nine]

  Get your “What, Me Worry” Halloween cut out mask here.
  http://www.scribd.com/doc/7533946/What-Me-Worry-Mask

• [Richard XXIII]

  I did my hastily cobbled together attempt – only to the amusement of people into alternative cinema of the Sixties – right here:
  http://uglyradio.wordpress.com/2008/10/22/swope-08/
  I like it, but am continually having to explain to to people.

• [Kieran O’Neill]

  #15: I dunno. I’d reckon it’s about 30% hate (in a fairly evenly bipartisan split), maybe 10% irony and 100% silliness. :)

• [bfarn]

  You know I commonly hear that poster referred to as the Obey Obama poster… but I never realized how chilling an image that makes until I actually slapped it right on there.

  http://www.bfarn.com/Obey.jpg

  Now I’m a dyed in the wool leftist, and the man has my vote. But a lot of the anti-socialism fearmongering conservative crazies I know look at that hope picture and just see a skinny Chairman Mao.

• [lectroid]

  Can I just mention how cool it is for an artist to publicly applaud and encourage others to remix, reimagine, and reference his art?

  So many times the response we see to images that become popular or iconic is lawsuit and repression.

  Bravo, Mr. Fairey.

• [Clayton Hove]

  “What, me worry the far right?”

• [OM]

  …Barrack Obama as a white guy. Yep, that’s exactly what he’d look like :-P

• [DataWhat]

  Similarly inspired I did one for my son “HANK” here:
  http://thejohnsonian.blogspot.com/2008/10/hoping-for-your-vote-in-november.html

  There’s a nice tutorial on how to create one of your very own using Photoshop and Illustrator here:
  http://vectortuts.com/illustration/create-an-inspirational-vector-political-poster/

• [Solo500]

  The actual cover using this image is pretty sharp.

  But the headline that grabbed me was:

  “John McCain’s Career – A 200-Year Look Back”

  http://www.dccomics.com/mad/popup_mag.php?i=11036

• [fltndboat]

  Great picture of my favorite deity.

• [buddy66]

  Wonderful stuff, all of it, all of you. Mr. Fairey should be, and no doubt is, honored.

  The ”NOPE” stickers are superb.

• [upso]

  i love that there is an obama ad with the fairey image on the same page as this post

  http://www.upso.org/bb/boingboing.gif

• [dogwelder]

  Yay- It’s got my self portrait!

  But he missed this one.

• [Zandr]

  Another parody not listed is this one, which I’m seeing wheatpasted around SF these days:

  http://frighteningprospect.com/

• [t3hmadhatter]

  haha, i love mad, and this is only some of the great stuff they do with parodies. its good to have a sense of humor about even the most serious issues, even if its only a little. it helps the human mind distance itself from trauma and keep from blowing a fuse.

• [freshyill]

  Wow, lot of ignorant hate on that poster page. I can’t wait until January when Obama rounds up all the Christians and converts them to Islam. Oh shit, I wasn’t supposed to say that yet! Damn, now my socialist overlords are going to take away my latte allowance now.

• [cornfield_alley]

  Ha! Check out the pillow I made for Sarah Palin, mugging Shepard Fairey’s CHANGE poster:

  http://www.lfadams.com

  It’s in the Pro/Con: Political Craft show at Rebus Works in Raleigh, up through late November.

  See more images on my flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cornfield_alley/sets/72157607677066385/

• [dodi]

  I have this sticker (on a magnet) on my car:
  http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=15736727

• [Bill Simmon]

  I ran a contest on my blog in June for reader self-portrait photographs and the prize was an opportunity to run any image/ad they wanted in the blog’s sidebar for a week. The contest winner was Philadelphia illustrator Kasten Searles, who asked me to run this image on the blog for her prize.

  That’s Burlington, Vermont weatherman Tom Messner. Kasten is from Burlington (where I live) and Messner’s cheesy mug is instantly recognizable to anyone who’s lived here in the last 20 years, but no one else in the world would have any idea who the hell it was. The other part of her prize was that I worked the name “Meteorologist Tom Messner” into ten posts in a row without explanation. My readers were perplexed, but it was fun.

  Kasten also just did this nifty topical Halloween sketch…

• [WeightedCompanionCube]

  ECCHcellent!

• [Javier Candeira]

  A couple of days ago I made my rather clumsy attempt, inspired by XVIIth Century Spanish playwright’s Lope de Vega‘s first name.