Cute Dictator

Brazilian artist Butcher Billy thought: what if Kim Jong-un was Batman? Or Super Mario? Or just went straight for Hitler? He built a whole project around these dumb hypotheticals called Friend Or Foe—pop culture icons with a dictator’s face. The result is genuinely absurd: one of the world’s most brutal murderers rendered as a cute comic-book character. Evil in primary colors.

There’s something perfect about taking the most terrible person imaginable and pasting him into somebody else’s life. Strip away the camps and the propaganda and what you’ve got is just an illustration. A joke. A pudgy man in a plumber’s outfit. It’s funny because it works, because human evil doesn’t actually look that different when you take away the context.

I wonder if Kim Jong-un ever sees something like this and thinks about himself the way normal people do. Someone probably showed him once. That meeting probably didn’t go great. But theoretically, theoretically there’s a version of the world where a dictator sees his face turned into a cartoon and understands, for one second, how small that makes him look.

Billy’s got the right idea: take the monstrous and render it cute enough to put on a t-shirt, cute enough to laugh at, and suddenly it’s not mysterious anymore. It’s just a man in a comic book.