ZOMBAMA IS HUNGRY!

Betcha didn't know that Barack Obama had a twin zombie brother who was also running for president last year, didya? Alas, his platform was far too simple, and his rallying cry of "Brains..." lost to Barack's more popular and inspiring "Hope". What's a zombie to do?

Anyway, the lesser brother's campaign was just as historical as Barack's, so why not commemorate the first undead candidate in US history by buying a print from me? I've only minutes left until the secret service helicopters land in my front yard and haul me away for tastelessness involving a US President!

Oh, and by the way, if your interest in this piece is borne from some racist, murderous feelings you might have towards President Barack Obama, and you are mistaking this artist as harboring some wishful death threats against the president, please go away. I do not want your attention or your money. Good day.

I wanted to do an Obama piece (along with everybody else on the planet, evidently), but since my brain has been irreparably warped by cartoons and pop-culture nonsense I simply could not realize this intent with any level of serious meaning or maturity. I was looking at some of the parody images out there, several of which were based on the popular Shepard Fairey piece seen here...



And here's a collection of some of the parodies. Most are lame. My fave by far is the Bob Hope piece. The Soup Nazi image would be great as well, if it were at all competently executed. Oh well. (Revised to include the Luke Skywalker "New Hope" piece which my friend Adam Volker called my attention to. Thanks Adam)



Most (if not all) of the parodies I came across were a bit obvious, choosing to rely on simply basing their ideas on words that rhymed with "hope". I wanted to run in the opposite direction, so I chose to parody the parodies (as well as Fairey's reputation for using appropriated images in his art) by turning Obama into a zombie at the risk of coming across as an Obama-hater and attracting the attention of the FBI. Also, zombies are teetering on the edge of being overexposed in pop-culture (if they haven't already tumbled mindlessly over the edge of that pop-culture precipice). The slogan was easy, cuz what other slogan would a zombie choose for his campaign? Also "BRAINS" does not in any way rhyme with "HOPE", yet it somehow totally does. Think about it...

I did a search before moving forward with this image to make sure no one had beat me to the punch. A fairly thorough web search turned up many crappy "zombie Obama" images, but no one seemed to have thought to combine the concept of a zombie Obama with the "hope" poster, and no one had so far thought to coin the name "Zombama". Victory is mine! Just a note that there was no filtering an photo manipulation involved in this image. A drawing was made from scratch based on the original design and the color areas mapped out carefully with pencil and paper, imported and completed in Illustrator.



I can hear the Secret Service knocking at my door, so I must sign off for now.