In February, I wrote about graphic artist Todd Alcott's fantastic propaganda posters for the fascist oligarchy, but his newest project is so amazing, I just have to bring these to your attention too.
Alcott is creating a series of cards, made to look like baseball cards of the 1970s, but for Trump's rogue's gallery of Enemies of Democracy. Alcott's grim humor and pitch-perfect designs reach new heights with these cards. You can follow them at Alcott's Instagram account.
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And Alcott is on his way to making a full set of 54 actual, physical playing cards. You can place your pre-order now on the Kickstarter for his project right here.
I emailed Alcott about these, and he wrote back:
I started these after the inauguration. Like everybody, I felt so helpless and frustrated; the new administration was so expressly evil and the Democrats were acting like they had no idea this was going to happen, and I realized that the citizenry of the world is now engaged in a world war with the wealthy people of the world. It would be great to present a sort of map of evil.
I remembered back in the Gulf War there was the deck of cards that the Department of Defense made to hand out to soldiers of the top targets in the war. And then Topps actually had a series of trading cards for the Gulf War. I thought, well, let's combine those ideas, and, because I am who I am, I decided to make them look like Topps baseball cards of the 1970s, because that was my trading-card era. I was never into baseball but I always loved the graphics.
So I thought about presenting our current platoon of evil clowns as a sort of baseball team, where each player has a specific function within the game, but they are also our most clear and present enemies of democracy, working right now to destroy the world I grew up with, and the world I strove to create for my children. They want to negate the lives and existences of everyone who helped create the post World War II world of prosperity and growth. And the media, because it's owned by the same people, is thrilled to cheer them on.
It's a living nightmare, and my toughest problem was trying to strike the right tone with the images, because these people are both incredibly dangerous and incredibly stupid. I'm always trying to strike a balance between making them look scary and making them look ridiculous, because they are, first and foremost, ridiculous: a whole army of naked emperors, not one of them worthy of an ounce of respect. They're caustic, short-sighted, narrow-minded zealots and criminals and they've managed to catch the entire world up in their madness, which is a really difficult thing to capture graphically while it's happening all around you.
I've also been looking at a lot of protest and propaganda art from the 1940s and the 1960s and then the 1980s, to see how other people fought back against similarly corrupt governments, and these images seem to hover somewhere in between what John Heartfield was doing in Germany in the 1930s and what Drew Friedman was doing for Spy Magazine in the 1980s, using graphics to create compelling satirical portraits of the wrongdoers of the day.
I can see Drew Friedman in these designs, and they also remind me of another 1970s trading card phenomenon: Wacky Packages.
I can't help myself posting a few more of these! They are genius.
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