Firas Alkhateeb, Obama Joker Artist Unmasked is a Fellow Chicagoan

Firas Alkhateeb, Los Angeles Times

Remember those cryptic posters portraying President Barack Obama as the Joker from "Batman" began popping up around Los Angeles and other cities? Well, the person behind the image has been revealed -- a 20 year old senior history major at the University of Illinois, Firas Alkhateeb. He reportedly crafted the picture of the president 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.

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.

Then the counter exploded after a still-anonymous rogue famously found his image, digitally removed the references to Time Magazine, captioned the picture with the word "socialism" and hung printed copies around L.A., making headlines.

Alkhateeb's original Flickr page surpassed 20,000 views. The Times found his Flickr site last week thanks to a tip left by a loyal reader of The Ticket. By Friday, the page had been taken down.

On Alkhateeb's page, a manipulated image condemning fellow Chicagoan and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel (captioned "epic fail") was mixed in with parodies of the "Guitar Hero" game franchises -- dubbed Quran Hero -- and of Napoleon riding a motorcycle (pictured after the jump).

Flickr had removed the Joker image due to copyright-infringement concerns, Alkhateeb says the company told him in an e-mail. A Flickr spokeswoman declined to comment due to a company policy that bars discussing inquiries about individual users. Source: Time Magazine

As menacing as this seems to many, this young man is within his rights to create the picture. Let's not forget that President George W. Bush was caricatured in a similar manner. Of President Obama, Alkhateeb says,"In terms of domestic policy, I don't think he's really doing much good for the country right now," he said. "We don't have to 'hero worship' the guy." He also added that socialism was the wrong caption for the picture and I agree with him wholeheartedly on that!