Artist Dan Luvisi offers twisted takes on familiar childhood characters
A badass Buzz Lightyear. A homicidal Fozzie Bear. A felonious Tigger. These are among the disturbing delights to be found on the blog of digital artist Dan Luvisi. Luvisi, who has previously toiled in the video game and comics industries and is currently preparing an illustrated book about “a Bounty Hunter and the extraordinary characters in his path,” has recently been using his personal blog to showcase his lovingly detailed yet undeniably disturbing renditions of some friendly, familiar characters from the realms of animation and puppetry. One image, for instance, has the normally gentle Kermit the Frog reenacting a particularly bloody scene from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive.
Another reimagines Eve from Wall-E as an automated angel of vengeance.
And there is an entire series of images cheekily titled “Grand Theft Otto” which place characters from The Simpsons into the kill-or-be-killed world of Grand Theft Auto.
Amusingly, Luvisi has chosen to accompany several of these pictures with passages of gritty, hard-boiled text written in the style of a pulp crime novel. (”Kermit sat at a diner alone, poking a floating fly in his stale coffee.”) These little flourishes make the artist’s blog one to savor, preferably while enjoying rotgut whisky and unfiltered cigarettes in a fleabag motel on the wrong side of town.