We’re familiar with child stars gone bad, but cartoon stars? The darkly humorous mind of illustrator Paul Ribera has imagined such a devastating world. In a series of frightening depictions, Ribera re-imagines cartoon characters from the '90s as if they had all developed serious drug habits. Think, the Powerpuff Girls on Molly, Hey Arnold smoking crack, and Dexter in a meth lab.
“I want people to know what goes on in the boarded up house and how it’s not all Kim & Kanye and happy stadium proposals the media tends to give off,” Ribera told the Huffington Post. “Life’s struggle is real and it’s in our own backyard and in this case, it’s in our cartoons.”
This nightmarish project is the result of the artist’s interest in “the drug lifestyle,” the effects of such a lifestyle, and a penchant for the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. One day, when watching re-runs of cartoons while he was working, Ribera decided to go “dark as hell with it and let the popular images the world knows turn into what I’ve seen on a daily basis for the past 20 years.”
[via HuffingtonPost]
