Brazilian pop artist (and firm Robot 6 favorite) Butcher Billy recently told me he was working on a project that would appeal as much to readers of Time as to the readers of this blog. I believed him, and waited eagerly to see what he was going to come up with.  He was right, and he's excelled himself. He's just posted The Legion of Real Life Supervillains at Behance, a gallery of images recasting some of humanity's very worst as four-color miscreants.

In Billy's own words:

"If back in the day comics and movies were pretty naive and faced only as pure escapism, today's fiction has to evoke reality to create something truly meaningful... and frightening.  This series is an experiment where a dictator, a psycho, a murderer (sometimes they are the whole package) or even a suspicious figure from real life is mashed with a comics bad guy - strangely related some way or the other with his counterpart.  The depressing thing? Realising that if the comic book supervillains were actually the ones threatening real life, the world wouldn't be such a bad place."

This series raises all sorts of questions and invites all sorts of controversies. Some examples below,  and be aware that Billy's Legion of Doom includes a couple of choices whose presence in such nefarious ranks you may well disagree with. I might distrust Facebook's ubiquity, but Mark Zuckerberg isn't exactly a genocidal tyrant (yet).